Odds and Unevens

Program Notes

For a while I had been fascinated by our willingness to raise our chances of attaining goals without being able to guarantee anything. We expend tremendous effort to make us more likely to find success, while maintaining a collective understanding that all aspirations are a roll of the dice to a certain extent.

Want to open a great restaurant? Roll the dice. If you’ve gone to culinary school, studied business management, and/or apprenticed at other establishments in the past, maybe the dice have a higher chance of coming up positive, but it’s never a guarantee. The same stands for any complex pursuit; engineer, composer, teacher. Climb a mountain, be drafted into the NBA, become a grandmaster. We can be pointed toward a path that will increase our odds, but nothing is a sure thing.

It’s crazy to me that we’re all casually content with that dynamic. It’s crazy to me that we are all satisfied to walk through the world with this weight of uncertainty looming over us, following us around.

I had been wanting to write a piece that reflects that tension for some time. The bump that the piece needed was a conversation I had with a friend of mine in the spring of 2018 in which it was remarked that it’s hard to find interesting, specifically modern, quality literature under around seven or eight minutes long. This piece was written to help fix that, or at least that’s a goal.