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Since I’m a St. Louis transplant, I know my way there.

When we go, Albert and I usually switch drivers at Cherokee Pass and type the exact destination into GPS.

Optimizing that tool increases the certainty of our arrival and helps us maintain an efficient, timely schedule.

However, at least once on every road trip we manage to get turned around anyway. Our departure times reflect this tendency.

Good thing. On our most recent trip he started in the driver’s seat so I could eat my Joyful Beans croissant. I abruptly interrupted our lively conversation. “Albert! What are we doing in Dexter?”

It was a grand nincompoop moment, resulting in non-stop laughter for several miles. The buffer we gave ourselves meant we arrived fashionably late, but not too late to miss out on the trip’s purpose.

This triggers existential gears in the ol’ gray matter. That lane switch failure altered ever so slightly the rest of the day. We could hypothesize on the differences being early might have made, but that reality we’ll never know.

Here is a thought from Brian Klaas, author of “Fluke, Chance and Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters: “What I started to appreciate is that the most important factors that determine the trajectory of my life are variables that I had literally zero control over…There is no moment that is a throw-away moment, even if we are unaware of them…We control nothing but we influence everything.”

Consider this.

The Secretary of War in 1945, Henry Stimson, convinced President Truman to drop the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima instead of Kyoto.

As a young man, Stimson had visited the city and wrote in his diary that he and his wife had fallen in love with Kyoto’s incredible charm.

Later, as the chief civilian overseeing the Target Committee, that memory pushed him to get it removed from the list. A sightseeing trip 20 years earlier affected that significant event.

Kokura was the target of the second bomb. (Hiroshima would have been). Cloud cover interfered, leading to the decision to drop it on Nagasaki. One memorable vacation, interconnected with clouds years later, altered history.

Klaas shared that his great-grandfather’s first wife killed herself and her four children in a moment of extreme despair. Ten years later, he married Klaas’s great-grandmother, thus, the reason there is a Brian Klaas.

“It gives you a lesson, I think, that the worst moments of your life are inextricably linked to the best moments of your life, and that the good and bads of our life end up creating future joy and future pain, and we can’t do anything about that.”

Randomness and chance reign, regardless of efforts to manage life with rules and principles. With perfect control there would be no need for buffers, life would be boring, and the slightest glitch would seem catastrophic. Randomness makes us resilient and increases chances for joy and creativity.