One of the people I coach was once among the ten best chess players in the world. He was telling me about a game in which, at a certain point, his position was simply lost. Not nearly lost – lost. Any strong player glancing at the board would have shaken his head and begun thinking about the next game. He sat there a long while, staring at the ruin in front of him. And then he found a move. One move, quiet and brilliant, that no one had seen – and it saved the game. He drew a position that, five moves earlier, had been as good as dead.
Now, if you had stopped the clock at that earlier moment and asked, “What is the probability that he loses?” any expert would have said ninety-nine percent, perhaps more. And they would have been describing something that never happened. The loss they were so certain of did not occur. It was never, as it turned out, real. It was a construct they had draped over a living, unfinished situation.
We do this constantly. We assign probabilities – I have a fifty-fifty chance, this is a long shot, that is a sure thing – and then we suffer over the odds we ourselves have invented, as though they were features of the world rather than stories in our heads. The physicist’s famous cat, sealed in its box with its vial of poison, is neither alive nor dead until the box is opened; both possibilities exist side by side until reality collapses into one of them. Your situation is the same. Several futures coexist, and you do not know – you cannot know – which one will step forward.
Consider the last World Chess Championship. In the final game the position was drifting toward a draw, which would have sent the title into a rapid tiebreak thought to favor the defending champion, Ding Liren. And then, under the crushing weight of the moment, Ding blundered. His young challenger, Gukesh, saw it in an instant, pounced, and took the championship outright – no tiebreak, no second chance. A moment earlier, the “probability” had pointed the other way. Moses parted a sea. Krishna lifted a mountain on a single finger. Anything at all can happen. Nothing is decided until it is decided.
So why does this matter for the way you live? Because if nothing is truly settled until it happens, then your despair when the odds look bad is premature, and your confidence when they look good is an illusion – and you are freed from both. You give your fullest effort to the move in front of you, and then you wait, with an open mind, to see which of the many possible worlds will actually arrive. You do not collapse the box before it is opened.
The Lesson. The probabilities you assign to your life are constructs, not facts — and life is under no obligation to honor them. A lost position can be saved; a won one can be thrown away. Nothing is decided until it happens. So give everything to the effort, assign nothing to the outcome, and refuse to suffer over odds you invented.
Peace!
