Controlling Chance

There’s a desire in us to want control over a thing called chance. If you have mastery over chance, after all, you control your own fate.

How else can one explain the draw towards gambling, and the feeling of willing the cards into submission. “Luck is on my side,” we often tell ourselves, as though some deity named Fate is either an ally or a foe, and as though we can somehow bend the fabric of time and space in our personal favor.

It’s the desire to conquer chance that also leaves so many fearful of viruses, and so many obsessive with medicine. With the advertisements of a cure we see the means of preventing an arbitrary demise.

I also see signs of the human desire to conquer chance in the exercise industry. Athletes subscribe to every new fad and gadget possible in efforts to control their outcome. Dietary supplements, blood glucose monitors, ice baths, GPS watches, and VO2 Max machines are just some of the tools people use to control their outcome. I’m not criticizing these tools, as each of them can serve a useful purpose. I’ve used some of them personally. But with each of these “hacks” there is a desire to have control over one’s own outcome, to have finished the race before it begins, to watch the movie before the script is written.

It is this same burning desire to conquer fate that leads the modern Protestant-like athlete to overtrain. It is the overtrained athlete that sees success as a mathetmatical formula, as a means of “simply doing more at a faster pace.” The overtrained athlete wills his or her body towards a promised land, negligent of injury and pain perception. The watch shows a pace that must be maintained at any cost, on every day. Success is a matter of abiding by numbers.

It is this mentally that renders these types of athletes little more than the script in a computer program, rather than the programmer. The organic qualities of exercise are lost in an effort to gain power.

What is the solution? In my opinion, the solution is simple fun. It’s random, wild, and selfish fun. Exercise for the sake of joy.

Just watch kids exercise. They aren’t linear like adults. There is little planned because predeterminism is the enemy of a child, not the friend. Kids think little of athletic apparel, heart rate, or qualifying times. These are the dreads of the aged. And kids have something many adults don’t: smiles.

To relinquish control is a scary thing. However, as I’ve learned over the course of 37 years, we cannot control the future. We can make decisions that affect the future, but we never own rights to the final scene of the script.

We might as well enjoy what we have and save ourselves the existential dread.

Maybe luckily, I’ve never been good at gambling