The gods laugh at your plans: Chekhov, Jaspers, and life-changing moments

We can have our eyes on some distant shore, some faraway horizon, only to find everything come crashing down by the most unseen of events. As the Scottish poet Robert Burns wrote, “The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men. Gang aft agley” (often go wrong).

In Anton Chekhov’s play, The Seagull, consists of a cast of characters who are all, in some way, in love with something. Everyone in the play has some kind of ambition and plan, or they live in regret over the life they chose. They rail against how misguided or mistaken their life has been, while longing for something else.

They are each like a seagull, flying over the sea or a great lake, and aiming purposefully for the shore. The view up there is wonderful.

The longer the seagull flies, the more oblivious they are to how they tire or weaken. They’re so fixated on some distant horizon that they’re at the mercy to life’s sudden changes. They’re blinkered and distracted, and the gods love nothing more than the hopeful hubris of mankind.

The seagull is killed, its flight and plans annihilated, in one instant of random thoughtlessness.

While so much of our lives are spent in planning and preparation, the most transformative and significant moments are those which come at us out of the blue. These are what the psychiatrist Karl Jaspers called “boundary situations” — the ones we cannot initiate, plan, or avoid. We can only “encounter” them. These are not the mundane, everyday parts of our life — but rather they are things which thunder down to shake the foundations of our being. They change who we are. In Jaspers’ works, he broadly sorted them into four categories:

Death is the source of all our fear. We fear our loved ones dying, and we fear the moment and fact of our own death. When we know grief and despair, or when we reflect on mortality, we are transformed. We always know about death, but when it’s a boundary situation, it comes crashing into our lives like some grim scythe; an unforeseen curtain call. The awareness and subjective encounter with death transforms us.

Life is a struggle. We work for food, compete for resources, and vie with each other for power, prestige, and status in almost every context there is. As such, there are moments when we are inevitably overcome and defeated, but also when we are victorious and champion. The final outcomes of struggle are often sudden and great, and they make us who we are.

Hopefully, there comes a moment for each of us when we finally accept responsibility for things. For many, it comes with adulthood, but for others it comes much later still. It’s the awareness that our actions impact all around us, and our decisions echo into the world. It’s seeing the damage or tears we’ve caused. It’s to recognize that, however small or big, we’ve hurt and upset someone. It’s a profound pull of the heart that changes how we live, and it often comes on unexpectedly.

No matter how neat and ordered we might want our world to be, there will always be a messy, chaotic, and unpredictable exception. We can hope for the best, and make the plans we want, but we can never take a steering handle on the facts that will affect our existence

It is not possible to control and explain everything. In fact, day by day we face events that we cannot call anything else other than coincidences or hazards. We want order, and regularity. What we get is the mercurial and capricious throes of chance.

What Chekhov’s Seagull and Jaspers’ “boundary situations” get right is that we are each much more vulnerable than we might want to allow. A wedding, three years and a fortune to plan, is ruined by a stomach bug. An hour-long journey home for Christmas winds up getting you stuck in the traffic of a freak snowstorm. A lifetime achievement is overshadowed by a national disaster.

Our lives are defined by the unforeseen. We have our dreams, hopes and are flying to some faraway shore. Yet life doesn’t care. Around every corner, at every flap of our wings, everything can change.

“So much of life, it seems to me, is determined by pure randomness.”

-Sidney Poitier

“Everything's not going to go perfect. You're going to have some losses that you're going to have to bounce back from and some things that are a little unforeseen that you're going to have to deal with.”

-Tony Dungy