Serendipity and Free Will

Under an electron microscope, there is no difference between my body and the table I am working on. Both are made up of sub-atomic particles. These sub-atomic electrons can be thought of as being a wave of energy and particle of mass. And the strange thing is that one can observe them only as a wave or as a particle, never both at the same time. And according to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, you can never know exactly where an atom’s electrons are, only where they are most likely to be. Out of the randomness, there emerges a certain pattern that determines the nature of each atom.

I sometimes wonder, might not this randomness and general unpredictability of electron be a sign of a free will, that they can go or do as they wish? Consider someone observing the earth and us humans. From afar, we would all be acting very randomly and unpredictably because of our free will. We are not as constant and as consistent as, say, the movement of the stars and the planets. Because of our free will, it can be vary hard to predict where we will go or what we will do.

Yet, out of this seeming randomness and unpredictability, a certain pattern emerges that would define what our nature is, who I am. Sometimes, we ourselves are surprised at how things often turn out for the better, beyond our expectation. Various words have used to describe such events: serendipity, synchronicity, convergence, confluence. When tings come together to produce something marvelous.

I think of such event as moments of grace. There is Someone who makes things happen for the better. He tells us through such events that we are not in control. He is. He made us as we now understand the electron. The particle of mass is our body. The wave of energy is our soul or spirit. We are in continuous motion, all tending and converging towards Him. For we have to eventually go back to our Source.