Are we looking for meaning in all the wrong places?

Last spring, all my friends were in love. Kathryn had a boyfriend. Jesse had a girlfriend. Lauren had a boyfriend. Ryan had a girlfriend. Carl had a girlfriend. Shary had a boyfriend. Rick had a girlfriend. I had a boyfriend. And these were all people who were reputed as being finicky, coy, crabby, self-involved, idealistic, ambitious, needy and insecure. Clearly the gods were looking down upon the lot of us and saying, Enough.

So we talked about it a lot in emails and over the phone and at brunch. What did it mean? Were we all growing up? Had we collectively learned something? Perhaps the weather was great. Or ’cause George Bush was finally gone. How long could it last? Forever, we agreed, stars in our eyes.

But if it wasn’t to last, we whispered in twos, who would be the first to break the spell? We all agreed: Kathryn. She was the most fickle, coy, self-involved, idealistic, ambitious, needy and insecure of the bunch. Unless I was, and when I was out of the conversation, they agreed it would be me. In any case, the worries bubbled up over coffee and eggs: if the spell broke for one of us, would it break for the rest of us as well, and like dominoes we’d be knocked back down to our norm, base, single state?

Thankfully, Leonard Mlodinow was coming to town. A few months earlier, we had been passing around his book, The Drunkard’s Walk. The book is about randomness, and its central thrust is that humans, almost biologically, are incapable of grasping the laws of randomness. Even mathematicians have trouble understanding how it works. But its laws live in everything. And I wondered, as I climbed on my bike to go see him, whether randomness wasn’t the main actor in this sudden shift in the love lives of my friends.

The Drunkard’s Walk begins with Mlodi