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05/05/03
My momma always said,
"Life is like a box of chocolates, you’ll never know
what you're gonna get." That’s the famous quote from
Forrest Gump, an imaginary character created by
Winston Groom in his 1994 novel Forrest Gump.
But
life is not always like chocolate - sweet. Life is a
reality and it is bitter in most cases.
A
friend of mine who is studying Statistics said,
“Life is stochastic. You’ll never know in what state
you are in the next period.”
Wait a moment, does it sound so confusing? Not really.
Imagine our lives are expressed in a finite number of
periods, from the time we were born to the time we
die. Period could be in terms of hour, minute, second
or could be in terms of year. In each period, there
are a finite number of states. State number 1 may be
happy, number 2 may be sad, number 3 may be winning,
and so on. So, as we move from one period to another,
our lives change from one state to another
stochastically (randomly).
“Not quite so,” argued religious people. Life is a
blessed and has a purpose (and so there is a
deterministic aspect to it).
Since not all people are religious, let’s try to
reconcile these two camps. Consider a simple
mathematical function
Life = f(S, D)
Life is a function of stochastic factor, S, and
deterministic factor, D. So, while there are
some stochastic components attached to life, it has
also some deterministic components. Each individual
has its own stochastic and deterministic levels. The
struggle in life is to maintain the level of
stochastic components up to the point where people can
handle whatever the outcomes that may arise. At the
same time, they must find out what is the
deterministic component that they need to maintain and
enhance.
Once upon a time, there was an old man lived in my
parents’ neighborhood. He usually came to his home
around midnight after spending hours in a bar drinking
several glasses of traditional alcoholic drink. He got
drunk almost every night which made me curious why.
Later on I found out [someone told me what had been a
general knowledge in the neighborhood] that the old
man was used to be a rich guy. But he was addicted to
gambling and only in a short period of time his life
was degraded drastically from a rich man to a poor and
drunken man. Well, he amplified the stochastic
components of his life.
When I was a kid, I wanted to become a preacher. Not
because I was a religious person, but because in my
view at that time, a preacher was someone that people
liked and someone who liked people. A likable
individual. His [our preacher] typical gesture at that
time was smile. But as I grew up and studied at junior
high school, I wanted to become a pilot. That’s
because at that time a pilot was someone who was
highly respected and whose job was prestigious. Then
in high school, my aspiration had changed again. At
that time, I wanted to become an agricultural
engineer. Having witnessed closely how hard farmers
had to work and yet still lived in poverty, I thought
that there must be something wrong with the way they
and things worked. A good agricultural engineer must
have the answer to that. That was in my view. Indeed,
after being accepted to a prominent agricultural
university, I was ready to realize my aspiration.
Soon I discovered that becoming an agricultural
engineer was not so interesting.
Are
these changes due to stochastic nature of life? I
don’t know. The only thing I know is while the
aspiration, the life and the environment have changed,
the purpose of life does not that is to be valuable to
society. What I am missing perhaps is how to cope
horrific circumstance, which so often occur in our
lives, effectively. Once I know that, life becomes
beautiful as Italian comedian Roberto Benigni
portrayed it perfectly in Life is Beautiful. As
portrayed in the movie, in the battle against
barbarism there are also the weapons of joy and
imagination: Love and life itself. The movie is a
fable love enduring under the most horrific of
circumstances, a German-run concentration camp.
Thus, the missing
part is the joyful attitude, and, if we could add, the
things that we want to remember. Do we resort to
remember bad experiences or the good ones?
About seven years
ago, I was traveling to Fort Collins, Colorado. After
landing in Denver International Airport, I had to take
a shuttle van to Fort Collins which would take about
40 minutes. While on the shuttle, an old lady in her
early 70s sitting next to me asked me what was my
final destination. I said I just visited a friend and
would get off at a mall and my friend would pick me up
when her class was over. It was about 8.30PM and not
until 9PM my friend would be over with her class.
About 15 minutes after the driver dropped me, a lady
with an old Buick car approached me. It was the lady
in the shuttle. I said, “Is there anything wrong.”
“No,” she replied. I just wanted to make sure that you
were okay and perhaps needed a companion before your
friend picked you up. She said she lived nearby. What
a lovely lady! Although I did not really need a
companion at that time, we, including my friend,
finally chatted for about 30 minutes. An experience
that always makes me smile.
Many problems in the
world exist because people tend to remember their bad
experiences over the good ones, and tend to see the bad
sides of others instead of the good ones. When people
tend to do the former, just like gamblers, they
basically magnify the stochastic components of their
lives. As a result, people are losing focus of the
deterministic component of their lives which represents people’s life purpose.
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