A few weeks ago, I glanced at the beginning of a book one of our sons was reading. The book was Leonard Mlodinow’s The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, and its opening paragraph was most provocative: 

“It struck me then that I have Hitler to thank for my existence, for the Germans had killed my father’s wife and two young children, erasing his prior life. And so were it not for the war, my father would never have emigrated to New York, never have met my mother, also a refugee, and never have produced me and my two brothers.” 

This arresting opening evoked thoughts of the random turns that have had a profound impact on my life, primarily the unexpected meeting with a previously unknown, college alum who persuaded me to apply to his school, which accepted me and thus created life possibilities that could not have existed otherwise; and the life-altering encounter there, at a pinball machine, with my future wife, brought to the same school from a radically different background and set of life experience by still other random events and in whom, despite these differences, I found a soul mate. 

Yet without that alum, I never would have met her.

Random things aren't always good, of course. More than two hundred people perished in last week's Air France plane crash. They did not choose that fate. People are afflicted, against all odds, by certain diseases or killed randomly by drunken drivers. But randomness certainly has a profound affect on our lives.

Those musings take another turn today. Last night, preparing for the release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, we and our kids finished a five-night Harry Potter movie orgy with a re-screening of installment five, HP and the Order of the Phoenix. (Kind of early, I know, but Number 1 Son has been home for a few days and won’t be in the week leading up to the July release of the next movie. So we accommodate.)

In #5, considerations of randomness come crashing against another possibility: destiny that is so firmly ordained that it can be prophesized. The Department of Mysteries, in the Ministry of Magic, holds a globe that contains the prophecy that explains Harry’s relationship to Voldemort. The Dark Lord, hoping to gain the key that will ensure his triumph in his renewed war for domination, wants to seize that prophecy—to seize Harry’s destiny. 

Do we have destiny? Is our path laid out before us, certain and unalterable? 

Or does randomness rule our lives—randomness that nudges us in one direction or another, albeit allowing us to make certain choices? 

Of course, the two possibilities are not incompatible. Our destiny might include those random events, those chance encounters that lead our feet along particular paths.  

But where does free will come in? Are we nothing but the product of that subtle interaction between genetics and environment, shaped inevitably in a particular way, buffeted in random but destined ways to fulfill a prophecy, the existence of which we—like Harry—are completely unaware? 

I’ve always, on faith, accepted the free will thing. Sure, random events happen. They open, or close, doors for us, introduce us to one person and not to another. But it is what we do at (and past) those doors, and what relationships we build with those people, that sets our life course. If I hadn't finally acknowledged that my future wife was absolutely right, and we should get together, I wouldn't have enjoyed the past 35+ years.

Yes, those choices are shaped by nature and by nurture. But they are shaped, not determined. (Shaken, not stirred?)

Mlodinow expresses this view at the end of his opening paragraph:

"The outline of our lives, like the candle’s flame, is continuously coaxed in new directions by a variety of random events that, along with our responses to them, determine our fate.”

As Dumbledore tells Harry, it isn’t the deep similarities between him and Voldemort that matter. It is the differences. Because of those differences, Harry makes different choices, caring for people and working to save them rather than seeking power and domination. 

We all do have a destiny, a common one, in fact: we are fated to make choices.