It was nine years after Alaska became a state that the means for it to sustain itself was discovered. It happened inside that shack on March 12, 1968, roughly a mile and a half from the shore of the Arctic Ocean. Seventeen years later, nearly to the day, I was recruited to go work for one of the two companies responsible for the discovery. (The other company interviewed me but didn’t offer me a job). About four years later the company relocated me to work in its Alaska office, located in Anchorage. All of this might never have happened. Prior to drilling the discovery well, more than a dozen others had been drilled – dry holes every one of them. Finally, a last ditch decision was made to drill one more. It was always so.
All of our experiences are completely shaped by events that preceded us. Even though it seems to each of us, at least in part, that we are the cause of our own outcome. As if the present and future are a mystery until we choose to reveal them. But you know what, the more I think about that, I don’t think it’s true.