A probable chance of precipitation

Her chameleon skin umbrella was effective at making her blend in with her surroundings

~§~

Another thought as incomplete as the last but this time related to a specific photograph…

Occasionally things just fall into place, seemingly by luck or divine intervention. I would subscribe to luck over divine intervention but since both pertain to superstition I prefer to think of it in terms of probability.

While walking through the cobblestone streets of Orleans in France I came across the mural in the photograph. I’m a sucker for trompe l’oeil artistry and so found myself stopped in my tracks looking over this particular artwork. I had no intention of photographing it; as much as I enjoyed it I wasn’t driven to capture it. I was happy to just consign it to memory and move on.

But then something happened.

A single drop of rain landed on my cheek just beneath my eye, catching my eyelashes and making me blink a few times. In hindsight it is difficult to know exactly what changed but something did. I found myself turning on my camera, bringing it up to my eye and composing to make a photograph. Looking through the viewfinder I noticed the colours of the cobblestones on the street and how they matched the colours of the mural. I noticed the lines and curves of the seats and the steps blending in with the curves of the painting but still I was holding off from pressing down on the shutter button. If someone had asked me what I was waiting for I would not have known what to say. It just felt like a pattern was forming and a piece was missing. Then suddenly, my eye still glued to the viewfinder, a woman walks into the frame and puts up her umbrella, perhaps also having just had a drop of rain land on her cheek. Despite being a little startled by her unexpected appearance, my finger pressed down on the shutter button and the image was made.

The dynamics of the scene is completely changed by the appearance of the woman and her umbrella. The pattern on the umbrella matches the cobblestones, the colours blends in perfectly and the curves, formed by the ribs, are there too. Without the woman and her umbrella this photo would not have had the same impact on me.

So what made me take a photo when I had only just previously decided not to? What made me wait for the woman to enter the frame? Was it luck? Coincidence? Does life play with dice or not? Albert Einstein, at least I think it was him, once said, and I’m paraphrasing, we can live as if nothing is a miracle or we can live as if everything is a miracle. Meaning that as far as the laws of science refer to reality they are not certain and as far as they are certain they do not refer to reality.

The reality is that I’ll never answer these questions. I doubt mind and language have the capacity to express let alone understand the full picture — if you’ll excuse the pun — but I don’t care. I don’t care if it’s luck, divinity or fate but if pressed I would have to say that life is simply a matter of probability.

While the game of life may appear to be played in accordance to a set of rules, I get the feeling that the game is fixed, at least within the constraints of probability. Like tossing a coin. Prior to each toss you can’t be certain of the outcome but given enough tosses you know the outcome is fixed. That’s what probability does. But what were the odds that I would be standing there, camera in hand, when the woman entered the scene? Too great to be anything else but a coincidence? Well then, what were the odds that the dust that came out of the Big Bang, 13 billion years ago, would, over those billions of years, come together to form an umbrella, or a camera, or an eyeball? I mean how mind-boggling is it that we are here at all? Mind-boggling because as I said before, I doubt mind can grasp the full reality of what’s happening here and now. But just as there was a probable chance of precipitation that day in Orleans, that photograph was in all probability, a done deal even 13 billion years ago. After all, events with billion-to-one odds happen every minute of the day do they not?

Accepting that there are no answers to my questions, at least none that I could ever hope to comprehend, I live as if every thing is a wonder. It might just improve my odds of making better photographs.