"Chance, fate—these are abstract ideas that usually raise abstract questions. Do people have story-like fates..."

"... or are they just subject to concatenations of occurrences? Do things happen 'for a reason,' or do we just make up stories after the fact to tie events together? Broadly speaking, there’s an ancient antagonism between the notion that life must make sense and the observation that it often doesn’t.... And yet, at times when fate is actually 'happening,' such questions recede. Instead, what stands out are the physical particulars of the here and now. In the hospital, after the accident, you know your life is changing; you sense your proximity to what the novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard calls 'the deep, slow-shifting layers of reality where fate is at work.' Somehow this abstract understanding exists alongside, or by means of, the objects in the waiting room—a paper cup from the water cooler, or a copy of People magazine."

Writes Joshua Rothman, in "Should You Believe in Fate? We’d be happier, perhaps, if we found meaning not through abstractions but through the physical things around us" (The New Yorker).