A Coincidence? I Think Not! or actually maybe it is. I don’t know.

During this holiday season, as my family was heading back from Jirisan, a mountain in South Korea, I was listening to the audiobook of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (narrated by none other than Stephen Fry) in the car. Never before had I even considered listening to an audiobook, but it was a fairly long drive and I get carsick easily if I have my head bent over a book whilst in a moving vehicle.

Interestingly enough, I was at the part, where the massive computer named Deep Thought, revealed that the answer to life, the universe, and everything, is 42. I chuckled a little. Not saying British humour isn’t hilarious – because there were other parts of this novel that had me laughing considerably harder – but I suppose the joke hit me with a pang of bleakness. Nobody and nothing knows the secret of life dummy. You are chasing a fools errand.

But this emotional pitfall quickly resolved itself, for me anyways, because I swiftly recovered by remembering that life may very well be, incredibly, shitty if we knew the answer to such a question. And by that, I mean shitty all the time. It is a hunch. Nothing more really. I may very well be wrong. It may very well be the case that if we knew the answer to that non-question, we would live like gods.

Yet, isn’t it the fact that we have both the inability to resolve such dumbfounding queries whilst also having the ability to conceive of them in the first place, what makes us human?

And at that very moment, as I heard the passage in my earbuds, we were passing by exit number 42 on the highway.

What a coincidence I thought, and how appropriate that such a coincidence would happen whilst listening to a book that features an invention called the Infinite Improbability Drive.

It was then that I thought, it is when moments like these happen – moments of pure chance, amidst all the universal chaos, when the stars align to make something like this to happen – that I get this jovial feeling that everything will be ok. That not everything will go to shit. Well eventually, things do go to shit, but life offers you small victories from now till then. Just don’t panic.