An exceptionally interesting passage from “The Gamble” by Liza Mounzer:

“…he was a great believer in the future. For himself and the world at large. It was the promised land where everything we’d ever wanted would come to be. It was his favorite tense. When we are; we will; we’ll have; you’ll see. I used to think that belief in a shining future was a way of refusing to dwell on the failures and disappointments of the past. A form of resistance to it. Now I think the opposite. I think the past and future are the same place, taking long refuge in either the same thing. A way of avoiding, not living in, the present.”

“He saw religion as the purview of the dull-witted, those who weren’t brave enough, intellectually speaking, to strike out into the unknown. I also think it’s because religion necessitated a belief in fatalism, in the idea that everything that comes to pass comes to pass because god has written it so. This meant that the future, too, was already decided, as irrevocably locked-in and unchangeable as the past. already decided, as irrevocably locked-in and unchangeable as the past. And when the past was all doom and defeat, the highest probability was that it foretold the same about the future. Thus, no one wishing to make their way forward and upward in the world could afford the indulgence of such a thought. To shed a belief in fate was somehow to shed the weight of the past altogether.

“And yet, despite his rejection of what he called nonsense, my father also had faith in the strange, random, improbable, and unpredictable possibility called luck, which is different from the set of fortuitous circumstances referred to as privilege. A lot of what looks like luck on the surface is in fact, upon further scrutiny, privilege. And my father, though he would never learn of that particularly modern word for it, knew very well how to recognize privilege, for there is almost no one to whom it has been denied who cannot identify the halo of its blessing always hovering above someone else’s head. But luck, real luck, can happen to anyone. Real luck, in fact, is the only wild card that can trump privilege.

“This possibility, I think, is what my father gambled on his whole life, even as he convinced himself that beneath it all was simply a code of probabilities that could be cracked given enough determination and smarts.”

Sadly, her father’s beliefs were all contradictory because he was an addict, a happy drunk… but there is a lot of truth to those beliefs. It’s all good but the conclusion is particularly poignant:

“I wish there were a system to follow, a code that could be cracked. But I wouldn’t even know how to go about finding it. My beliefs, like my father’s, are a contradictory mess of cold logic and riotous feeling, of magical thinking coupled with disdain for certain kinds of faith. Like my father, I carry the vast histories of my region and my country, as well as the smaller histories of my family and myself, each of them inflected by tense, aspect, mood, and voice. Out of this chaos I must every day try and make a story to best serve my purposes. That is all I can do. I know that what I write today is not what I would have written yesterday, nor is it what I might write tomorrow. I might regret the things I’ve revealed, or the things I failed to say. I am choosing to write it regardless. The only real truth that can ever be told, anyway, is that of the continuous present.”

This essay made me think about all of the experiences I’ve had (and Emily, too) that don’t make for compelling stories unless we fold them into other ideas, somehow related but disconnected at the current moment.