Thankfully, “This Day In History Month” ended with October 31.
We are now onto other things, here in November.
Most mornings, when I sit down to write this, I think of the astute words of George Eliot.
“Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.”
Or, in this case, the woman.
Most mornings, there isn’t much of anything on my mind.
That is until I open up my digital newspaper and read the headlines. Then my mind travels to many places quickly. Sometimes, my emotions, too.
I mostly have decided to steer clear of writing about “current events” on this blog. I used to do it all the time. But then, I figured. The world is so saturated with the news of the day that I should let them stop where this blog door opens.
So, I hope you all will keep stepping inside.
Because today, I thought I’d mention something about shuffling cards.
I like cards, first of all. I’ve shuffled them a lot in my lifetimes. I can do the fanny thing where you fluff them all together. Most people can, but there are a few who don’t own this shuffling skill.
Anyway, I wanted to share a video with you. It comes from a TikTok video by Neil deGrasse Tyson. You don’t have to watch it if you don’t want to, as I will attempt to explain it here.
( https://www.tiktok.com/@neildegrassetyson/video/7268016699335642410 )
In the video, he talks about math, which I know little about.
But. He revealed that the possible number of ways you can shuffle a 52-card deck is unfathomably large. He said it is “52 factorial,” which can also be described as 52! — a 52 with an ! behind it.
This means, he said, that you could gather one trillion people, hand each of them a deck of cards, tell them to shuffle it one trillion times per second for one trillion years, let that happen across one trillion civilizations in the Universe, let that happen across one trillion Universes.
And if you do all that, you will have a big bunch of different shuffly sequences.
But then, if I stand here with a deck of cards right now and shuffled — I would only have a 40% chance of matching the sequence of any single one of the decks in that experiment.
From that understanding, you could make a strong claim that no two decks of cards in history, when properly shuffled, have had the same sequence.
It is pretty mind-blowing to consider.
But do you know what?
This is our every day. You. Me. Everyone. All eight billion of us, stumbling around on the surface of this planet.
We make decisions. All the time. In every second of every minute of every day. We are making decisions.
And each one builds on the next.
It is how your son came to exist. How you met the love of your life. It is the reason you have on those fuzzy slippers. (Bright green looks good on you, by the way.) Or those fuzzy dice on your rearview mirror.
These decisions account for everything. It is the reason you are reading this right now and the same set of reasons why you only got a “B” in fourth-grade math.
Our Universe is moments. Connections. Misses. Energy. Speed. Light. All flowing and all moving, all the time.
And we are here because of decisions. Millions and millions of years of decisions, which all led up to the moment we were born. It is magnificent to think of it. How it all came to be. That it is possible that things lined up exactly as they did for you and me to be sitting here, interacting right now.
Shuffle those cards, baby. The possibilities are endless.
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“The infinite is in the finite of every instant.”
— Zen Proverb
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“There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.”
— Aldous Huxley
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“In the infinity of life where I am, all is perfect, whole, and complete.”
— Louise Hay
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The beginning of everything, and on it goes.
