Do we live in a world of "it just so happens...?"
Let me share with the reader the following true episodes.
In 1971 I joined a multi-national corporation. This was in the Philippines so we were just one of many of its worldwide semi-independently run companies in the region. In that year, as a new marketing employee, I was assigned a task, just for the week, to host one of the potentially up and coming leaders in the Asian region who was one of many attending a week-long conference in Manila. He was with the Vietnam division based in Saigon. I took him around for a quick tour of my assigned territory of responsibility- a section of Manila - and to meet some of our local dealers. I will use only his first name - Dai An. An means gracious in Vietnamese, I was told.
We bid our goodbyes when I saw him again after their week's conference was over before he left for the airport. Later that year I was getting married. A week or so before that date I received a package delivered to me by one of the flight attendants of Air Vietnam. It was from Dai An. He remembered my coming wedding and that was his wedding gift.
Fast forward to four years later. We all saw on TV on April 30 as Saigon was overran by the North Vietnamese Army in 1975. Needless to say, the Vietnam division of the multinational corporation, like all other companies in Vietnam, was gone. It was tragic to witness it all as the whole country unraveled and turned into an information black hole. Over the next few years that followed I kept wondering what happened to Dai An.
Fast forward to five years or so later. My family and I immigrated to the U.S. I was fortunate to have been accepted to work in the U.S. company that was and still is part of that group of multinational corporations. My second year assignment in 1981 was coordinating our asphalt shipments to various plants in the Midwest. One day I visited our plant at Pekin, Illinois. I met with the plant manager and after we had lunch, on an after thought before leaving, I went to look one more time at the dock where our barges would come in to unload the asphalt. It so happened that the tank foreman who oversaw the tank farm was there as well. During our conversation he revealed that he used to work in Saigon for the same multinational corporation I worked for in the Philippines. He was Vietnamese and it so happened that his boss there, way several rungs above him, was Dai An, who had since leaped-frog into the Managing Director of aviation supply and distribution after the Manila conference. And the most pleasant surprise of all was what the foreman revealed. Dai An is not only in the U.S., he works for the same company we both worked for. Dai An was in marketing.
The first thing I did back in Houston was to find Dai An - one of, at that time, 35,000 employees spread out over the U.S. and its territories (only), excluding the worldwide companies that make up the total multinational group that was perhaps five times or more that number. We talked over the phone and caught up with some of each other's life. Then a few weeks later on another "it so happened" turn of events he was transferred to Houston on a new assignment. We had more time to catch up over many lunches since we worked in the same building (different floors).
What Dai An went through is worth re-telling here.
Just before Saigon fell when a U.S. retreat was imminently near, Dai An was asked to remain until the last minute of evacuation to insure that U.S. planes were fueled. Meanwhile, the U.S. consulate flew Dai An's wife and daughter ahead to the U.S. and for Dai An to follow later as soon as all the planes had been fueled. Unfortunately, as evacuation came to its chaotic end Dai An did not make it out. He and some members of his family hid and moved from place to place for months and months, using what money and valuables they saved.
One day just when much of their resources were about gone he and some of his family were able to secure passage on a ship. They were smuggled out like so many boat people we kept hearing on the news and TV. After so many harrowing days at sea, including the rape of his sister by fellow passengers, and near abject starvation, the ship was intercepted by the U.S. Navy. Like all so called "boat people" they became refugees, some of whom were brought to the U.S.
Meanwhile, his wife, like so many separated family members, kept calling the State Dept. to search for Dai An. As we can all imagine there were thousands of displaced individuals for the State Dept. to attend to. Meanwhile, she also kept calling the U.S. corporate office to help with the search. The company actually did have HR staff and the services of outside personnel engaged to comb through every refugee camp to search for war-displaced Vietnamese employees of the Vietnam division. Then one day, they found Dai An. He was at an Arkansas refugee camp.
After reuniting with his family the company had him go to graduate school at company's expense to earn an MBA degree with a promise of employment after that. He joined the marketing department later and that was where I reconnected with him.
Dai An was a changed man since I last saw him in Manila a decade earlier for reasons that hardly need explaining. You see, Dai An had all the upper class upbringing, a Paris education and fluency in French like a first language, He was destined to the upper echelon in the organization and his position even then gave him enough clout to have a Vietnamese Air flight attendant personally deliver his wedding gift to us. It so happened that the turn of events made him come down from the perch of the upper crust privilege to becoming one of the boat people. We cannot imagine what that was like. His sister never recovered from the physical and psychological trauma that shortly after arriving in the U.S. she committed suicide. Dai An was not a broken man but the struggle to survive took its toll. The effortless smile that I remember was now a struggle between suppressing a pleasant emotion against bitterness and helpless incomprehension of the fate he was dealt.
In early 2000, the exact year I could not recall, he took a Mideast assignment. We lost track of each other again as I too moved to various assignments within the company. I retired in 2007.
Fast forward to thirteen years later in 2020, just a month ago. The gym where I used to swim has never re-opened to this date. As Covid-19 lock down restrictions eased up a bit the Homeowner's Association Aquatic Center opened the 50 meter pool to the resident-members. I started swimming there. The lanes were reconfigured to 25 yard lengths cross-wise to accommodate more swimmers and better social distancing for a total of 25 lanes versus just 8, lengthwise.
One afternoon after a few laps I took a break and struck up a conversation with the gentleman at the next adjacent lane who was also taking a break. It so happened that he was also a retiree from the same company I worked for except that he worked at our Houston refinery. He too was a Vietnamese refugee who worked for the same multinational corporation while he was in Vietnam. He was fortunate to have come just a bit sooner than 1975. And he knew Dai An!
The sad news, he told me, was that Dai An passed away in 2012. Sadness gripped me once more.
I never had a chance to reconnect just one more time.
In case you haven't noticed there were a series of "it just so happened" episodes. I visited our Pekin, IL. plant only once - just that one time - and had moved on to other assignments later. It just happened I went to look at the dock one more time before leaving. Had I not done that I would not have met the tank foreman. The 50-meter pool's reconfigured 25 lanes, shown in photo, is a large area but it so happened that I took that lane adjacent to that particular one where the gentleman was already swimming. By the way, so far in over a month I did not see the gentleman again.
The law of causality didn't seem to be at work here. The causality principle is meant for one happenstance to cause another to happen and after a long chain of causal events we have history. Here, "it just so happened" had linked certain events to come together, albeit over expanse of years in between. Let me back up for a bit.
Dai An and I even if we had lived in the same country our paths would not have crossed. I came from a very poor family. He came from the upper crust, more at home among the elite national and international luminaries and bureaucrats. Our social circles, our communities, our friends, would have been too far distant from each other for any hope of intersecting. Even if we, say, worked for the same multinational corporation in the same country, our paths would still not have crossed had I not been picked to give him that tour. In our company at that time, I never crossed path socially or even casually with the senior executives - vice presidents and up.
I would like to go back to the first sentence above. Is the universe made up of "it just so happened" events.
Our world - a tiny speck that is a particle of dust in a swirling sea of a hundred billion stars that is part of billions, if not a trillion, galaxies - is home to all who've ever lived and it will be the home for every generation of living things to follow. We limit that to the kind of life we know because to speculate on anything else outside of our planet will make it an overwhelmingly impossible task to contemplate, let alone understand.
It just so happens that our sun is a medium size one because any larger and the energy and radiation it puts out might not allow the life we know to develop. Any smaller and there might not be the kind of energy to sustain life (again, the kind of life we know). It so happens that it is a second or third generation star because as such it was born from a supernovae explosion. Only a supernova explosion from which other stars are born will produce the heavy elements, like potassium, iron, even oxygen, etc. that are necessary for life to emerge. Only a supernova could have produced silver and gold, etc. for no other event will produce the extreme heat and pressure to make all the heavy elements beyond carbon.
It just so happens that there was a third planet to orbit that medium-size star that was formed 4.5 billion years ago, that is in a zone that is neither too hot nor too cold. A second planet, Venus, is much too hot for a habitable atmosphere, the fourth planet, Mars, is way too cold for water to naturally exist as a liquid. It just so happens that earth was the place for the recipe for life to work. But even when life was fully developed for over many millions of years, it just so happened that a Mount Everest size asteroid hit earth 67 million years ago to cause the extinction of the then super dominant species of dinosaurs so that mammals could emerge to dominate the landscape and bring about the species from which we came. Lest we forget the dinosaurs ruled for about 160 million years.
It just so happened that it would take that long for a lot of other things to develop so that we are able to live like we do today. It so happened that there was enough time before we showed up for all the decaying vegetation over millions of years to be buried deep under tremendous pressure for conversion into hydrocarbon to occur. Along with that by the way was how diamonds were made.
It so happens that we only have one moon but that it is the right size and distance and orbital speed to cause the gradual rising and ebbing of the tides - its effect on the gravitational pull it exerts but only enough to move the sea level. So many "it just so happens" that actually boggles anyone's mind. Did you wonder too that the moon happens to not only be this particular size but to be at a distance between the earth and the sun to make total eclipse possible. But what is really significant is that only a total perfect eclipse, the moon's superposably covering the sun for Einstein's theory of general relativity to be proven for the first time.
Just way too many "it just so happened" to get us here today. As we examine our lives from near or far distant past the number of "it just so happened" events were far too many in a single lifetime. Go ahead, make a list. The seemingly endless string of "it just so happened" events seem to dictate our overall experience. Either the universe had been conspiring all along to make it all seem like "it just so happens" or ...
I leave it to anyone with faith of every persuasion to continue thinking and re-thinking this because in so doing you will have realized that it took an endless "it just so happens" to get you here and there will be more to get you to whatever destination awaits you.
Personal Footnote: When we first arrived in the U.S. I did not immediately apply to work for the same multinational corporation I worked for in the Philippines. It was about three months later that I wrote a letter. A week after I mailed my application I came across an article in the Oil and Gas Journal at the Brooklyn Business Library (We were in New York and stayed with my wife's sister's family), where I spent some time to read up on business news. It was pre-internet era. In that article was a featured story on the Gen. Manager for Distribution in that multinational company. I wrote him a personal letter where I attached the same resume I sent out earlier. A day after I mailed it, I got the dreaded rejection letter from the company. It was obviously a response to the application I sent a week earlier. Had that letter arrived just a day earlier I would not have sent the second one, recognizig the futility of it. But "it so happened" I already mailed the second one but only after I had chanced upon that O&J article, another "it so happened" event. Two weeks later I received a telegram (again, this was before internet) from the same person at personnel who signed the rejection letter, asking me to call collect for a phone interview and potential trip to Houston. After a month they sent me a plane ticket for an interview. The rest is history. Clearly, the "it so happened" was quite crucial to how things turned out for me and my family.
Of course, and I say this without any reservation that along with all of those, I also happened to pray a lot, more than I had ever prayed before.
And then ...
My daughter in law with whom my son has two children came to the U.S. with her family on a boat out of Vietnam via the Philippines under similar circumstances that were true for thousands of refugees, many of whom came to the U.S. Lives unconnected until she and my son met under "it so happened" circumstances decades after Dai An's and mine intersected in 1971.
The first thing I did back in Houston was to find Dai An - one of, at that time, 35,000 employees spread out over the U.S. and its territories (only), excluding the worldwide companies that make up the total multinational group that was perhaps five times or more that number. We talked over the phone and caught up with some of each other's life. Then a few weeks later on another "it so happened" turn of events he was transferred to Houston on a new assignment. We had more time to catch up over many lunches since we worked in the same building (different floors).
What Dai An went through is worth re-telling here.
Just before Saigon fell when a U.S. retreat was imminently near, Dai An was asked to remain until the last minute of evacuation to insure that U.S. planes were fueled. Meanwhile, the U.S. consulate flew Dai An's wife and daughter ahead to the U.S. and for Dai An to follow later as soon as all the planes had been fueled. Unfortunately, as evacuation came to its chaotic end Dai An did not make it out. He and some members of his family hid and moved from place to place for months and months, using what money and valuables they saved.
One day just when much of their resources were about gone he and some of his family were able to secure passage on a ship. They were smuggled out like so many boat people we kept hearing on the news and TV. After so many harrowing days at sea, including the rape of his sister by fellow passengers, and near abject starvation, the ship was intercepted by the U.S. Navy. Like all so called "boat people" they became refugees, some of whom were brought to the U.S.
Meanwhile, his wife, like so many separated family members, kept calling the State Dept. to search for Dai An. As we can all imagine there were thousands of displaced individuals for the State Dept. to attend to. Meanwhile, she also kept calling the U.S. corporate office to help with the search. The company actually did have HR staff and the services of outside personnel engaged to comb through every refugee camp to search for war-displaced Vietnamese employees of the Vietnam division. Then one day, they found Dai An. He was at an Arkansas refugee camp.
After reuniting with his family the company had him go to graduate school at company's expense to earn an MBA degree with a promise of employment after that. He joined the marketing department later and that was where I reconnected with him.
Dai An was a changed man since I last saw him in Manila a decade earlier for reasons that hardly need explaining. You see, Dai An had all the upper class upbringing, a Paris education and fluency in French like a first language, He was destined to the upper echelon in the organization and his position even then gave him enough clout to have a Vietnamese Air flight attendant personally deliver his wedding gift to us. It so happened that the turn of events made him come down from the perch of the upper crust privilege to becoming one of the boat people. We cannot imagine what that was like. His sister never recovered from the physical and psychological trauma that shortly after arriving in the U.S. she committed suicide. Dai An was not a broken man but the struggle to survive took its toll. The effortless smile that I remember was now a struggle between suppressing a pleasant emotion against bitterness and helpless incomprehension of the fate he was dealt.
In early 2000, the exact year I could not recall, he took a Mideast assignment. We lost track of each other again as I too moved to various assignments within the company. I retired in 2007.
Fast forward to thirteen years later in 2020, just a month ago. The gym where I used to swim has never re-opened to this date. As Covid-19 lock down restrictions eased up a bit the Homeowner's Association Aquatic Center opened the 50 meter pool to the resident-members. I started swimming there. The lanes were reconfigured to 25 yard lengths cross-wise to accommodate more swimmers and better social distancing for a total of 25 lanes versus just 8, lengthwise.
One afternoon after a few laps I took a break and struck up a conversation with the gentleman at the next adjacent lane who was also taking a break. It so happened that he was also a retiree from the same company I worked for except that he worked at our Houston refinery. He too was a Vietnamese refugee who worked for the same multinational corporation while he was in Vietnam. He was fortunate to have come just a bit sooner than 1975. And he knew Dai An!
The sad news, he told me, was that Dai An passed away in 2012. Sadness gripped me once more.
I never had a chance to reconnect just one more time.
In case you haven't noticed there were a series of "it just so happened" episodes. I visited our Pekin, IL. plant only once - just that one time - and had moved on to other assignments later. It just happened I went to look at the dock one more time before leaving. Had I not done that I would not have met the tank foreman. The 50-meter pool's reconfigured 25 lanes, shown in photo, is a large area but it so happened that I took that lane adjacent to that particular one where the gentleman was already swimming. By the way, so far in over a month I did not see the gentleman again.
 |
| I took this photo during a distant thunder alert when everyone had to get out of the water to wait until the warning was lifted. Note the size of the pool area is not trivial, by any means. Though the odds were not too overwhelmingly minuscule the "it just so happens" event when taken together with the other previous ones was quite something to behold. |
The law of causality didn't seem to be at work here. The causality principle is meant for one happenstance to cause another to happen and after a long chain of causal events we have history. Here, "it just so happened" had linked certain events to come together, albeit over expanse of years in between. Let me back up for a bit.
Dai An and I even if we had lived in the same country our paths would not have crossed. I came from a very poor family. He came from the upper crust, more at home among the elite national and international luminaries and bureaucrats. Our social circles, our communities, our friends, would have been too far distant from each other for any hope of intersecting. Even if we, say, worked for the same multinational corporation in the same country, our paths would still not have crossed had I not been picked to give him that tour. In our company at that time, I never crossed path socially or even casually with the senior executives - vice presidents and up.
I would like to go back to the first sentence above. Is the universe made up of "it just so happened" events.
Our world - a tiny speck that is a particle of dust in a swirling sea of a hundred billion stars that is part of billions, if not a trillion, galaxies - is home to all who've ever lived and it will be the home for every generation of living things to follow. We limit that to the kind of life we know because to speculate on anything else outside of our planet will make it an overwhelmingly impossible task to contemplate, let alone understand.
It just so happens that our sun is a medium size one because any larger and the energy and radiation it puts out might not allow the life we know to develop. Any smaller and there might not be the kind of energy to sustain life (again, the kind of life we know). It so happens that it is a second or third generation star because as such it was born from a supernovae explosion. Only a supernova explosion from which other stars are born will produce the heavy elements, like potassium, iron, even oxygen, etc. that are necessary for life to emerge. Only a supernova could have produced silver and gold, etc. for no other event will produce the extreme heat and pressure to make all the heavy elements beyond carbon.
It just so happens that there was a third planet to orbit that medium-size star that was formed 4.5 billion years ago, that is in a zone that is neither too hot nor too cold. A second planet, Venus, is much too hot for a habitable atmosphere, the fourth planet, Mars, is way too cold for water to naturally exist as a liquid. It just so happens that earth was the place for the recipe for life to work. But even when life was fully developed for over many millions of years, it just so happened that a Mount Everest size asteroid hit earth 67 million years ago to cause the extinction of the then super dominant species of dinosaurs so that mammals could emerge to dominate the landscape and bring about the species from which we came. Lest we forget the dinosaurs ruled for about 160 million years.
It just so happened that it would take that long for a lot of other things to develop so that we are able to live like we do today. It so happened that there was enough time before we showed up for all the decaying vegetation over millions of years to be buried deep under tremendous pressure for conversion into hydrocarbon to occur. Along with that by the way was how diamonds were made.
It so happens that we only have one moon but that it is the right size and distance and orbital speed to cause the gradual rising and ebbing of the tides - its effect on the gravitational pull it exerts but only enough to move the sea level. So many "it just so happens" that actually boggles anyone's mind. Did you wonder too that the moon happens to not only be this particular size but to be at a distance between the earth and the sun to make total eclipse possible. But what is really significant is that only a total perfect eclipse, the moon's superposably covering the sun for Einstein's theory of general relativity to be proven for the first time.
Just way too many "it just so happened" to get us here today. As we examine our lives from near or far distant past the number of "it just so happened" events were far too many in a single lifetime. Go ahead, make a list. The seemingly endless string of "it just so happened" events seem to dictate our overall experience. Either the universe had been conspiring all along to make it all seem like "it just so happens" or ...
I leave it to anyone with faith of every persuasion to continue thinking and re-thinking this because in so doing you will have realized that it took an endless "it just so happens" to get you here and there will be more to get you to whatever destination awaits you.
Personal Footnote: When we first arrived in the U.S. I did not immediately apply to work for the same multinational corporation I worked for in the Philippines. It was about three months later that I wrote a letter. A week after I mailed my application I came across an article in the Oil and Gas Journal at the Brooklyn Business Library (We were in New York and stayed with my wife's sister's family), where I spent some time to read up on business news. It was pre-internet era. In that article was a featured story on the Gen. Manager for Distribution in that multinational company. I wrote him a personal letter where I attached the same resume I sent out earlier. A day after I mailed it, I got the dreaded rejection letter from the company. It was obviously a response to the application I sent a week earlier. Had that letter arrived just a day earlier I would not have sent the second one, recognizig the futility of it. But "it so happened" I already mailed the second one but only after I had chanced upon that O&J article, another "it so happened" event. Two weeks later I received a telegram (again, this was before internet) from the same person at personnel who signed the rejection letter, asking me to call collect for a phone interview and potential trip to Houston. After a month they sent me a plane ticket for an interview. The rest is history. Clearly, the "it so happened" was quite crucial to how things turned out for me and my family.
Of course, and I say this without any reservation that along with all of those, I also happened to pray a lot, more than I had ever prayed before.
And then ...
My daughter in law with whom my son has two children came to the U.S. with her family on a boat out of Vietnam via the Philippines under similar circumstances that were true for thousands of refugees, many of whom came to the U.S. Lives unconnected until she and my son met under "it so happened" circumstances decades after Dai An's and mine intersected in 1971.
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