The Kindness of Random Acts

Someone once warned me, “Don’t be grateful for what you don’t have. Be grateful for what you do have.”

Here’s my response based on 50+ years of living:  “Nonsense.”

I’m very grateful for what I don’t have and I don’t think for a second that this attitude devalues my overwhelming appreciation for what I do have.

Clearly, I’m thankful for the good stuff in my life—health, family, friends, Obama’s election, yada, yada, yada.

But not to acknowledge and be grateful for the near-misses would shortchange what I know to be true: that life is more like the board game Chutes and Ladders than it is like Monopoly.  You have far less control than you think.  All the strategizing, all the investing—whether in Park Place and Boardwalk, or in vitamins and mutual funds—don’t amount to a hill of beans if you roll snake’s eyes.

When somebody says, “It all works out for the best,” I’m infuriated because I know it often doesn’t.

What?  I’m not Eeyore the Donkey, but I’m no Pollyanna either. I’m not one who imagines a guardian angel spreads its wings over my life.  If there were, why me, and not the 26 people who died last October in a commuter train crash?  Why me, and not the 15 girl students who had their faces sprayed with acid last week in Kandahar?  It can’t be all geography.  It must be random, this fickle finger of fate.

How many of us know at least one person who exercised, ate wholesome foods, and had everything to live for, yet is now dead from some hideous disease, fluke accident or purposeful event like suicide, homicide or terrorism?  Within a year of graduating high school (and granted mine was a big, public affair) six classmates were dead.  Ann went for a doomed ride in a Cessna; Denise was shot by a jealous boyfriend. The other four I didn’t know.

On August 30, 2001, I boarded a jet at Logan International Airport. As I walked through the first class cabin, I passed a handful of plotting murderers whose faces I recognized a fortnight later when they were identified as the terrorists who flew jets into the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers.  Only 12 days separated me from being someone who picked up luggage after a six-hour flight to LAX and a statistic among the cinders of thousands who perished on September 11, 2001, in New York City, Washington, D.C., and a farmer’s field in Pennsylvania.

The list of near-misses grows longer every year—should I be grateful for its length?  I am—more than anyone knows.  I perseverate, in fact, on each and every small—and huge—near miss, hoping that somewhere between the bad choices, the bad luck and the random grace, lies the answer to a small unanswerable question that I am lucky enough to be able to ask after all this time:  How can I make every moment count?