He steps on a penny. 
That morning, lurking just below the horizon, the sun is ready to shine its first beams of light. A cool breeze, saturated with the humidity of the morning mist, whispers in his ears. Barely intelligible. He couldn’t quite decipher what it’s trying to say, or whether it’s trying to speak at all.
Intrigued, he looks down to notice the penny, starting to shine as the first morning beams flare its surface. He picks it up. Once in his palm, closer to his eyes, the carvings on the penny seemed unfamiliar. The more he looked at it, the stranger it appeared to his eyes.
The goddess of odds stood before him with her happy side majestically facing him. She smiled and whispered: the prayers you made the night before have been answered. Later that week, the rare penny was auctioned for a small fortune.

He steps on a penny. Intrigued, he looks down to notice the penny. It’s just a penny. He moves on.

Countless pennies get stepped on countless times day after day. And the rare pennies, sitting there defying the passage of time, get stepped on countless times before someone picks them up. When they finally do, the aura of mystery is never away. The presence of the goddess of odds feels as real as the penny being picked up. Her whispers carried by the morning breeze are heard loud and clear. She goes by many names. Some call it destiny, others call it divine, and many use words that start with para or meta or something along those lines… And then there are those, like myself, who just call it math. 

There is indeed a formula. A simple one that doesn’t need a major in science to grasp:

  

or in a slightly different form:

The first form is known as the definition of “probability”¹. The second form is useful when making a tour at an auction gallery and being confronted with but a few of the most amazing stories, the type of which collectors are fond of. 

is easy to measure. Those are the stories we tell. The ones we listen to with eyes wide open and jaws struggling to fight with gravity. is hard to compute: it requires a complicated model of reality that even the most evolved AI on the planet doesn’t have enough neurons to describe². But intuitively, we know when it’s small, when it’s impalpably tiny, and often we’d be right. The one that seems to be hard to grasp, that defies common sense and feeds into mystery and wonderment, is .

is what we don’t measure. The stories we don’t tell, those that remain unnoticed even by the protagonists themselves. Stories too insignificant to live and certainly too dull to listen to. We tend to forget they exist or at least fail to imagine their sheer numbers. Our ancestors, concerned with the number of prey they were able to catch and the number of predators they managed to escape, did not evolve brains to deal with huge numbers. After all, who needed to count the stars in the sky or the hairs on their head?

The truth of the matter is, that the rare penny was sitting there for centuries getting stepped on while waiting to be picked up. Sooner or later, somebody would have. The whispers turned out to be but the sound of the breeze caressing the leaves. And the goddess of odds, to whom we attribute more than what she actually does, was merely counting the steps and taking notes in her book of time, mainly for her own curiosity. Never she cared to intervene. Maybe by fear of biasing her own data. See, she’s as wholesome as a goddess can be.

And we, oblivious to the many untold stories, fill in the blanks of our nescience with stories fabricated by our minds. Another great skill of our imaginative brain: filling in the blanks. For some reason, those of our ancestors who took the time to investigate when they had incomplete data, got eaten by what turned out to be a predator. 

Mysteries, miracles, curiosities, wonders, omens, prophecies, paradoxes, coincidences, and the list goes on. Count the number of minutes that exist in the many lives there are, contemplate the many ways the next minutes could unfold based on the events of the minutes that came before, and the unlikely becomes foreseen³.

We seek mysteries in peculiar events that actually happen every day. Our brains crave wonderment and awe; and yet, recognizing that the unusual and the mundane are made from the same fabric of chance, shall make the story no less magical, only more real. Suffice to remember the greatest achievement of the goddess of odds: out of the endless possibilities of gene arrangements that never saw the light, it is us who are here, alive in this moment, wondering about the world — not simply as a coincidence to dismiss, but also as the most awe inspiring accident of all.

1. The connoisseur here might object slightly and demand more rigor in the usage of the terms. I’m aware of that. I’m also aware that for what concerns the usefulness in this context, this is an accurate enough definition. ↩︎
2. Those who studied probabilities at high school may remember how nontrivial it was to compute probabilities for problems involving a handful of colorful balls. Now imagine extrapolating this to a problem involving billions of people doing random things at random places all day long all over the planet, with the added complexity that what any one person does at any given time, may or may not impact what the others can or cannot do from that time onward. ↩︎
3. The connoisseur requesting mathematical rigor might again protest that multiplying the very tiny with the very large (0 × ∞) yields an undetermined result. Here we’re talking about phenomena that occur frequently enough to get noticed, but not enough for our brains to get used to. So for the technical pendant, we’re interested here in the cases where (0 × ∞) yields a finite result. ↩︎