Back in my infancy when I graduated from high school and thought I knew everything, I gave the valedictory speech at graduation. My title was “You get from life what you put into it.” How smug that sounds to me today. The lessons of time and experience have taught me that life is much more random that that. The course of your life is not determined by hard work and will alone, but by hard work, will combined with health, luck (good or bad) and sheer randomness. You can control some factors, but not all of them and even with the best of control of your own efforts, you can’t control others. We all like to take credit for our successes and blame outside forces for failures. That’s human nature. There is, however, one way that we still have control and it’s in how we react. Are we positive or negative? Do we try for more kindness in our actions and less bitterness? Our attitude to the randomness of life plays a major role in how we get along and move along in the world, so I guess that old speech wasn’t so bad after all.

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