In praise of … trusting to chance

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/08/in-praise-trusting-chance

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There are few actions that may be done in despair but which still reflect a faith in the future. Sending a message in a bottle that may never arrive anywhere is one of them. Often it appears a last resort. Heart-rending notes from the decks of both the Titanic and the Lusitania have been found, along with words of fatalism pitched overboard by troops embarking for war. But the randomness of the fate of a message launched on the world's currents is a symbol of optimism too. This week a bottle sent off in 1913 re-emerged, pulled from the Baltic by a fisherman off the city of Kiel. Since the bottle originally came from Kiel, it may not have travelled far from where it was dropped into the tideless inland sea by a young man on a nature ramble. But the shortness of the journey his message made in space is transformed by the distance it has travelled in time, to a granddaughter of whose existence the young man can only have dreamt.