A well-chosen set of preconditions really leads to original challenges. Ionica Smeets challenges you this summer. Episode 5: Bring more randomness into your life.
I don’t know about your home, but we always sit in the same place at the table. I sit in the chair closest to the kitchen. My husband sits next to it in his homemade red Rietveld chair. Our son sits at the head of the table and our daughter sits next to my husband. If one of our children’s friends continues to eat, he or she will sit next to my daughter.
Recently I heard from a family that has no fixed places, they just sat down every meal where it suited them. Involuntarily I calculated how many options that would give us at home. If we take the chair next to my daughter and each choose one of the five chairs at random, we can sit at the table in 120 different ways.
The mathematical research institute Oberwolfach organizes conferences where the participants sit at round tables during meals, arranged according to a randomized schedule to maximize the number of possible encounters and conversations. The Oberwolfach problem is an unsolved problem in mathematics that asks whether it is always possible to arrange a table arrangement so that during a series of meals all possible pairs of participants sit next to each other exactly once.
Suddenly I realized that we have no fixed places on holiday. Whether we eat on the patio table at our cottage, or plop down at a beach bar, we always sit differently. Perhaps we should also introduce this at home: slightly less fixed patterns and a bit more randomness.
Richard Wiseman mentions in his book The Luck Factor maximizing chance possibilities as one of the most important traits of people who consider themselves lucky. On vacation, it’s easy to try new things with unfamiliar towns, menus full of mysterious dishes, and unfamiliar faces everywhere. In a familiar environment, randomness can help you experience more new things.
Choose a different chair and you will see the room from a slightly different perspective. Ask your neighbors what they are going to eat that night and make the same. Don’t take your regular route, but turn into another side street to have a look there. Or make one random walk where you go for a walk and randomly choose which direction to take at each intersection (for example, by tossing a coin or rolling a dice).
During lockdowns I regularly did this with my son and we came to places in our neighborhood that we had never seen before. We petted all kinds of neighborhood cats and admired art that people had put in their windows. The good news is that George Pólya has proven that such a random walk will almost certainly get you back to your starting point. The bad news is that it can take a long time, but you can of course decide at any moment that it has been nice and quickly walk back to your own trusted dining table.
Have you taken up this challenge? Send a message with the results to [email protected].