My wife and I are huge fans of Penn and Teller's show "Bullshit."

On it, they once said, everybody's got a gris-gris. What is a gris-gris, you say?

Superstition.

Bullshit.

Kalisa said that her was dreams. We know from neuroscience that dreams may be as little as "screen-savers" for the mind. Mostly just random firing, and some memory consolidation. But because of therapy, Kalisa reflexively tries to analyze her dreams.

I make fun of her for this, but then I found my gris-gris.

Destiny.

There is no destiny. It is foolish to believe in destiny, it makes you lazy. Instead of destiny what actually exists is opportunity.

Opportunity is striking while the iron is hot.

Opportunity is searching for profit like a buzzard hovers for carrion.

Opportunity is real.

Destiny is false, most of what we interpret as destiny are mathematically predictable events with statistics. Carl Gustav Jung believed in synchronicity, that the universe would occasionally act as a guide to us through coincidences. What madness.

The universe does act in predictable ways, ways in which the mathematics of statistics has the final word.

Even the most amazing of parallel coincidences is predictable to the point of inevitability.

In Natalie Angier's wonderful book "The Canon" she talks about a professor who does a demonstration of the power of statistics.

He asks the class to make a set of 100 coin tosses. 50 heads and 50 tails, which statistics says with something like a coin toss, as the set increases the percentage of each side in the set will approach infinitely closer to 50%, this is true. Its also crucial to remember, that counter-intuitively the probability of getting either heads or tails with each toss is ALWAYS 50%.

He asks one half the class to make up the coin tosses, and one half to actually toss the coins.

Then he leaves the room, unable to observe, which is which.

Upon his return he is able to accurately determine which is which.

Why?

Because the real coin tosses had unreal outcomes. They had 13 heads in a row, and things like that.

The fakers did not do this.

We as people can't seem to get it in our heads that crazy shit happens for no other reason than chance.

It was extremely hard for me to get my head around this.

Now I think plenty of people more conservative than me don't get this.

They are only conservative because they are cowards.

They still believe in destiny and all its trappings, but they still do nothing.

They sit around waiting for something to either happen to them or for them.

Without destiny this is even more foolish.

Chance whirls past you in a cyclone and often if you think too long, you were to slow.

These are the facts.

But if you accept the cruel reality of chance, then you begin to become hyper-aware of opportunity.

Opportunity is how you make your life count.

And its there, whirling past you, cease it!