Two or three people drifted in, maybe four, who nearly boarded the recently sunk Titan but, as a proverb from his mother suggested, paused because of a stumble or a misstep. They wipe their brows and grin at each other, the way strangers do when they survive a close call in the middle of a crowded street, wondering if they are still alive after a near miss with a moving motorcycle. In interviews, people who speak in estimates and approximations tend to attract sympathy because it feels easy to identify with marginal truths. We have all stood close to something missing, something imagined. Take the unborn, for example: a vast, chaotic stream of life racing toward the egg. A tiny glimpse of that microcosm, viewed under a microscope, shows a sprint of willful speed where the quickest is not necessarily the sharpest mind but the one that simply arrives first.
There are countless tales of passengers who lose a plane that later crashes. When journalists carry the symbolic artichokes of memory, they describe in exact detail the minutes before takeoff. It can seem like a miracle. Some attribute this to a departed mother watching from beyond, others to a vow made to a virgin, and some to a sense of order that persists through chaos. The common thread is that many professionals trust in fairy tales because they fulfill a human craving for meaning. They provide a framework for luck and fate to be seen as something more than random happenstance. No one claims it was sheer luck that saved someone from boarding a train or a bus. This is where the impulse to understand, to assign purpose, finds its strongest expression. Human beings seek causes for events, even when the link is tenuous, even when the odds feel stacked against certainty. It is a fundamental need to narrate life in terms of purpose, almost like a quiet ceremony we perform on temporary days.
Yet the illusion can be exhausting, a quiet reverse mysticism that refuses to give up its hold. A whole house collapsed recently, and the exact town escapes memory. Miraculously, no one was harmed on the lower floors. The word miracle lands with the weight of disbelief drawn taut, because there is often time enough to escape. Thinking back, it also seems miraculous to wake up in the morning and make it through the day, to step outside and return at night with no obvious loss. The truth, perhaps, is that everyone leaves pieces behind. We do not perceive those losses at once, because daily life dulls the senses with little inner explosions where something intimate quietly disappears. The mind absolves what is gone by weaving it into a broader story of resilience, luck, and routine, even when the losses are real and persistent. In this sense, life keeps moving, and the small devastations accumulate as the ordinary becomes the new normal. This is the paradox: safety and threat share the same street, and meaning travels through both, shaping the way people talk about survival and memory without ever fully explaining why certain events feel meaningful while others vanish from sight.”