Punya’s essay on the beauty of randomness landed differently for me than it might for most readers, because I have been living with a version of this question for years, ever since I picked up Leonard Mlodinow’s The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives. Mlodinow, a physicist and mathematician, makes a disorienting case: that the outcomes we attribute to talent, planning, and intention are far more shaped by chance than we are comfortable admitting. Stock markets, careers, reputations, relationships – the randomness isn’t just present at the edges; it runs through the core. And the deeper you go, the stranger it gets. At the quantum level, reality itself refuses to be pinned down. Particles don’t have definite positions until they are measured. Outcomes are probabilistic. The universe, at its most fundamental, is not a clockwork machine ticking toward predetermined ends: it is a vast, shimmering field of possibility. 

This is precisely the territory that quantum mechanics occupies, and I will confess freely: I do not fully understand it. I suspect I never will! But I take some comfort in the company I keep. Niels Bohr, one of the founding architects of quantum theory, is said to have remarked that anyone who is not shocked by quantum mechanics has not understood it. I am in awe, and I am regularly, almost embarrassingly, shaken by its conclusions. Whether it is the double-slit experiment, entanglement, or the measurement problem, each one of these, when I sit with it long enough, produces a kind of vertigo…a sense that the ground beneath ordinary reality is far less solid than it appears. And yet, paradoxically, I find this thrilling rather than destabilizing. There is something almost inspiring about being humbled by the universe’s refusal to be simple.

And yet, here is where the vertigo can turn into something darker. If so much is beyond our control, if chance governs more than we care to admit, does effort still mean anything? Do our choices carry moral weight? It is one thing to find beauty in uncertainty, and it is another to live inside it without losing your grounding. For many people, the honest acknowledgment of randomness doesn’t feel liberating; it feels paralyzing. If so much is beyond our control, if chance governs more than we care to admit, does effort even mean anything? Do our choices carry weight? So where does this leave us?

There is often an immediate, reactive debate about the nature of our universe and this attachment we have to fate or determinism – frankly, it often lacks nuance. If randomness governs so much, if a postal money order sent by a friend (as in Punya’s own story) can redirect an entire life, if a quantum fluctuation in the early universe can determine the large-scale structure of galaxies, does that mean our choices don’t matter? Does randomness dissolve moral agency? This is where I want to bring in a concept that often gets misunderstood, sometimes even dismissed as superstition: karma. Alright – a quick break to give this principle some meaning and context:

• A principle rooted in the philosophies of South Asia, karma has been discussed, written about, and digested by communities for centuries. Even Krishna (the narrator and master teacher of the Bhagavad Gita), acknowledges that the workings of karma are complex and difficult to grasp. And if even that acknowledgment exists at the source, perhaps we should resist oversimplifying it. I am no expert, and I won’t pretend to apply it with precision. But with broad strokes, the idea is actually quite elegant. As Swami Vivekananda and many in the yogic tradition would put it, karma is simply the law of causation: every action and intention leaves a causal imprint. It is not fatalistic. It does not claim that your life is already written. Rather, it insists that what you do and why you do it matters, that choices ripple outward in ways both seen and unseen. Whether you turn to the Gita, to Nagarjuna, or to Aurobindo, the through-line is consistent: karma is not a predetermined script but an invitation to take seriously the moral weight of how we move through the world.

In its ancient formulations, found across philosophies and traditions for millennia, karma is not fatalism. In other words, it is not the idea that everything is predetermined, or that suffering is deserved, or that the universe is keeping score in some cosmic ledger. At its most philosophically serious, karma is the recognition that intentional actions have consequences, and that the quality of our choices (their ethical texture, their orientation toward or away from harm) matters. Based on what I have understood or been explained, it is a causal principle, not a deterministic one.

The more I ruminate, here is what I find beautiful about holding both ideas at once: randomness and karma are not actually in conflict. The universe may indeed be probabilistic at its foundations, our lives genuinely shaped by contingency and chance. And yet, within that vast field of randomness, we make choices. Those choices have consequences, for ourselves, for others, for the communities and classrooms and institutions we inhabit. Karma, understood philosophically rather than superstitiously, doesn’t claim to predict outcomes. It claims that how we act, what we intend, what we practice, etc. – these things are not neutral. Randomness could govern, as Punya suggests, what happens to us. Karma speaks to what we do with it.

Punya writes, “a world where everything was predetermined would be a world without stories.” Mlodinov adds to this by emphasizing that things we attribute to sheer will, training, and grades are often results that are random and circumstantial. In either case, I found one common insight, in Punya’s anecdotes and mathematical descriptions of the drunkard’s walk: appreciation of small events. We live in a world Mlodinow describes as uncertain and humbling, but also in a world where it still matters, deeply, how we choose to act and recognize how seemingly miniscule events shape us. Being shaken by statistical improbabilities has not made me a fatalist. If anything, it has done the opposite. When I grasp, even partially, how unlikely my existence is (how many contingencies had to fall just so), I feel not freed from responsibility, but more called to it. The randomness and luck can be real. But, the will to change and impact is beauty – it’s even more real to me. And so, I believe, is the choice.

Which brings me to a film that I think holds all of this together more honestly than almost anything else I have encountered: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia. Anderson has spoken about the impulse behind the film with a kind of quiet defiance. He noticed that the three-hour epic treatment, the grand, sprawling, operatic form, was almost exclusively reserved for war films and sweeping social dramas. He wondered why. The relationships around him, the families, the communities, the quiet devastations passed between parents and children: these felt just as epic to him. Why couldn’t stories that seemed unrelated, that brushed against each other by accident or proximity or sheer coincidence, be told in that same opus way? Magnolia is his answer. It is a film about trauma and forgiveness, across generations, across families, across the strange accidents of geography and time that bring people into each other’s orbits. The stories seem disconnected until, slowly, they are not.

The title itself carries the theme. The magnolia flower is not a delicate bloom that requires perfect conditions. It is ancient, resilient, one of the earliest flowering plants on Earth…it perseveres precisely because it does not wait for ideal circumstances. It grows anyway. And I think Anderson understood this intuitively: the film is not about people who have been given good odds. It is about people navigating the wreckage of choices made by others (e.g. parents, mentors, institutions) and still having to decide, in that wreckage, who they will be. Randomness brought them together. But what they do with the encounter is entirely their own.

The magnolia does bloom despite its circumstances; more so, it blooms through them, carrying within its persistence a kind of quiet defiance. Perhaps that is the most honest thing we can say to a generation inheriting so much uncertainty: our agency within this randomness and causally connected world is as real. Every intention, every act of effort or forgiveness, ripples outward in ways we may never fully see, much like a wave approaching two slits, spreading into interference patterns no one could have predicted, yet shaping everything that follows. Wink wink!