Fortuitous Concatenations
Happy Thanksgiving to everyone whose eyes are rolling across these sentences! The quote from Lewis Thomas reminds me to be grateful for this weird and fleeting glimpse of conscious existence I am most fortunate to experience.
In a fluke encounter, I came across a fascinating book entitled Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters by Brian Klass, and this quote from the encapsulates the essence of the book:
"The tapestry of life is woven with a magical sort of thread, one that grows longer the more you unspool it. Every present moment is created with seemingly unrelated strands that stretch far into the distant past. Whenever you tug on one thread, you’ll always meet unexpected resistance because each is connected to every other part of the tapestry.
Or, as Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his letter from a Birmingham jail, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”
Below are three great stories taken directly from the book (in italics) to highlight the power of this "magical thread."
Story 1.
"On October 30, 1926, Mr. and Mrs. H. L. Stimson stepped off a steam train in Kyoto, Japan, and checked into room number 56 at the nearby Miyako Hotel. Once settled, they strolled through the former imperial capital, soaking up the city’s autumnal explosion of color, as the Japanese maples turned crimson and the ginkgo trees burst into a golden shade of yellow, their trunks rising above a bed of lush green moss. They visited Kyoto’s pristine gardens, tucked into the mudstone hills that frame the city. They marveled at its historic temples, the rich heritage of a bygone shogunate embedded in each timber. Six days later, Mr. and Mrs. Stimson packed up, paid their bill, and left.
Nineteen years later, far from the Japanese maples, in the sagebrush-dotted hills of New Mexico, an unlikely group of physicists and generals gathered at a top-secret location code-named Site Y. It was May 10, 1945, three days after the Nazis had surrendered. The focus now shifted to the Pacific, where a bloody war of attrition seemed to have no end in sight. However, in this remote outpost of New Mexico, the scientists and soldiers saw a potential savior: a new weapon of unimaginable destruction that they called the Gadget (the first nuclear bomb).
No successful test had yet been carried out to demonstrate the weapon’s full potential, but everyone at Site Y sensed they were getting close. In preparation, thirteen men were asked to join the Target Committee, an elite group that would decide how to introduce the Gadget to the world. Which city should be destroyed? They agreed targeting Tokyo wasn’t a good idea, as heavy bombing had already devastated the new capital. After weighing up the alternatives, they agreed on a target. The first bomb would be dropped on Kyoto.
Kyoto was home to new wartime factories, including one that could churn out four hundred aircraft engines per month. Furthermore, leveling a former capital would deal a crushing blow to Japan’s morale. Kyoto was also an intellectual hub with an educated population, home to the prestigious Kyoto University. Those who survived would, the committee supposed, recognize that this weapon represented a new era in human history—and that the war had already been lost. The Target Committee agreed: Kyoto must be destroyed.
The committee also agreed on three backup targets: Hiroshima, Yokohama, and Kokura. The target list was sent to President Truman. All they needed to do was wait for the bomb to be ready.
On August 6, 1945, the bomb code-named Little Boy fell from the sky not on Kyoto, but on Hiroshima, dropped from the Enola Gay. As many as 140,000 people were killed, most of them civilians. Three days later, on August 9, Bockscar dropped Fat Man on Nagasaki, adding roughly 80,000 casualties to the horrifying death toll. But why was Kyoto spared? And why was Nagasaki—a city that hadn’t even been considered a top-tier bombing bombing target—destroyed? Remarkably, the lives of roughly two hundred thousand people teetered between life and death because of a tourist couple and a cloud.
By 1945, Mr. H. (Henry) L. Stimson had become America’s secretary of war, the top civilian overseeing wartime operations. As a man without a uniform, Stimson felt it was his job to develop strategic goals, not to micromanage generals on how best to achieve them. But that all changed when the Target Committee picked Kyoto for destruction.
Stimson sprang into action. In a meeting with the head of the Manhattan Project, Stimson put his foot down: “I don’t want Kyoto bombed.” In a discussion with the commander of the U.S. armed forces, Stimson insisted that there was “one city that they must not bomb without my permission and that was Kyoto.” Yet, despite his insistence, Kyoto kept reappearing on the targeting list. It ticked all the boxes, the generals insisted. It needed to be bombed. Why, they wondered, was Stimson hell-bent on protecting a nerve center of the Japanese war machine?
The generals didn’t know about the Miyako Hotel, the majestic Japanese maples, or the golden ginkgo trees.
Stimson, unwavering, went straight to the top. He met with President Truman twice in late July 1945, each time outlining his vehement opposition to destroying Kyoto. Truman finally relented. Kyoto was taken out of consideration."
A chance tourist visit to Kyoto by a couple 19 years earlier who became smitten with the city and the Hotel Miyako ended up sparing the people of Kyoto but killing 80,000 others in Nagasaki.
Story 2.
On June 15, 1905, Clara Magdalen Jansen killed all four of her children, Mary Claire, Frederick, John, and Theodore, in a little farmhouse in Jamestown, Wisconsin. She cleaned their bodies up, tucked them into bed, then took her own life. Her husband, Paul, came home from work to find his entire family under the covers of their little beds, dead, in what must have been one of the most horrific and traumatic experiences a human being can suffer.
The Paul who came home to that little farmhouse in Wisconsin was my great-grandfather, Paul F. Klaas. My middle name is Paul, a family name enshrined by him. I’m not related to his first wife, Clara, because she tragically severed her branch of the family tree just over a century ago. Paul got remarried, to my great-grandmother.
When I was twenty years old, my dad sat me down, showed me a 1905 newspaper clipping with the headline “Terrible Act of Insane Woman,” and revealed the most disturbing chapter in our family’s modern history. He showed me a photo of that Klaas family gravestone in Wisconsin, all the little kids on one side, Clara on the other, their deaths listed on the same date. It shocked me. But what shocked me even more was the realization that if Clara hadn’t killed herself and murdered her children, I wouldn’t exist. My life was only made possible by a gruesome mass murder. Those four innocent children died, and now I am alive, and you are reading my thoughts.
That's right, the great-grandfather of the author of this book, Paul, was the guy who found his wife and kids dead. No murders, no Paul, no book, no newsletter post about the book being written in this moment.
Story 3.
In the summer of 2022, a routine tragedy took place off the coast of Greece. A tourist named Ivan from North Macedonia was swept out to sea. His friends rushed to alert the coast guard, but the searches came up empty. Ivan was declared lost at sea, presumed dead. Then, eighteen hours later, Ivan was found. Miraculously, he was alive. It seemed impossible. But just before he slipped below the waves to drown, Ivan had spotted a small soccer ball, floating on the surface in the distance. He swam over to it with his last ounce of strength. He clung to it through the night and was rescued. The ball saved his life.
When Ivan’s tale of survival made the Greek news, a mother of two boys reacted with shock. She recognized the ball Ivan was holding. Her two boys were playing with that exact ball ten days earlier when one of them accidentally kicked it into the sea. The ball had bobbed across the waves for eighty miles, until it converged with a drowning swimmer at precisely the right moment. The boys had thought little of the lost ball. They shrugged and bought a new one. Only later did they realize that without their accidental kick, Ivan would now be dead.
We forever surf on the ripples of others. Off the coast of Greece, Ivan experienced that truth quite literally.
Which brings me to the title of this piece: Fortuitous Concatenations. Fortuitous means happening by chance, coincidence, or accidentally. Concatenation means a series of things that depend on each other as if linked together. So Fortuitous Concatenations are a series of linked chance happenings.
Fortuitous Concatenation is a phrase I came up with when I was contemplating the improbability of my having surfaced from such a trying past as a juvenile delinquent to become so "successful" as a thoracic surgeon. As a young man I happened to walk by a furniture store that needed a delivery driver. I happened to get the job. I happened to deliver furniture to a pediatric surgeon named Stacy Roback, who happened to see something in me and take me under his wing. I happened to be just hanging out with him one Saturday, and he, off the cuff, suggested that I take a vocational interest test to see what career I should pursue, and I happened to find the idea motivating and took it, and it happened to tell me that my strongest bet was to be a physician, and on and on and on.
It is all just happening. Now I don't believe in some power engineering all of these happenings, and I am fine with people who attribute these happenings to God or a divine force, since who am I to deny the existence of such things?
Whether you believe in an engineered situation or the notion of all of this just happening in a random but deeply interconnected way, it's all a crazy ass miracle (or crazy ass happening!) that gives me pause and fills me with gratitude nearly every day, and not just on Thanksgiving, because the quote from Lewis Thomas is true.
I am walking around on planet earth because of a flash of a moment in time when the one egg in my mother's ovary that was "half of me" met up with the one sperm from my father on that one day they fooled around. If they had delayed their festivities by even seconds, I would likely not be here.
To carry this even further, imagine all of the events and things that have happened in the world and to others by virtue of that moment between my mother and father. My kids, the patients I have taken care of and operated on, the residents I have trained and influenced. The reverberations are incredible.
Here is a weird thought from Richard Dawkins:
We are lucky because we get to die, since our mere existence is a result of innumerable small, contingent details (Fortuitous Concatenations), ad infinitum.
Now that is something to be grateful for.
