What do you call a morning where you drop the soap in the shower twice, discover that all eight dishes from the leftovers warmed up the night before have been washed in the dishwasher, drop three of the first five ice cubes you try to put in your carafe of water to carry downstairs, find that the fan in your office has been moved again and you can’t hear yourself think for the rattle, hear that your two coffee appointments for the week have been moved, and discover the hard way that the milk is sour?You could call that a bad morning.
You could call it a morning where you pick up the soap twice, empty the dishwasher, pick up the ice cubes, hit the fan on top with your fist, make different coffee arrangements, and have toast for breakfast.
Under no circumstances can you call it a good start to your day.
I firmly believe that there is no predestination and things happen because you did something to make them happen, or more likely, because of the purely random chance that rules the universe of which I am a part. In other words, I either reap what I sow or settle for whatever the odds give me, and it is more often the latter.
It is good that I took some statistics at university, and that I had to use statistics a lot of the time in my work as a systems analyst. If I had not had the knowledge transfer and the experience, I would probably think that if you flipped a coin eight times, it would land four times heads and four times tails.
That, of course, is a simplistic crock. There is no reason at all, according to the science of statistics, that the coin cannot come up tails eight times out of eight. My morning proves it. It is true that where n is an almost infinite number, that the number of head will be about ½ n and the number of tails will be about ½ n. That is not to say that it is impossible that you would get n heads and 0 tails. It’s just not very likely.
Most of the time, we would see the equivalent of 8 heads in a row as good luck and the equivalent of 8 tails in a row as bad luck. In truth, it is just the universe working according to the physical laws of nature. It isn’t a coincidence, it’s just science.
Keep that in mind when you are having a bad day. Or a good one.