When you think of it, life is really just a big turn of the wheel. No matter how much we’d like to think we own it, things usually go totally at random. The same is true for accidents. Some are mildly interesting and make us go "wow," like this blossoming purple head of artichoke which wasn’t eaten right away, or this forgotten bag of grass seeds that seeded out.

On very rare occasions, such unintentional and totally unexpected "accidents" become much more than amusing pics that end up on your camera roll. We owe a debt to some of the most important discoveries of our lives, like Teflon, nylon, x-rays, penicillin, safety glass, and many more.

When you think about life in this way, we all depend on random chance. No matter how much we feast on horoscopes, what a fortune teller would say, or how much we believe everything’s in our control, we'd like to think we make decisions about things.

In this article on the neuroscience of chance, writer Michael Shermer comes to the conclusion that extraordinary events do not always require extraordinary causes. “Given enough time, they can happen by chance.”

Even if such a claim demystifies the magic of human power, free will, and hard work, it can also alleviate our heartaches when things go against the plan. If something bad happens, we tend to blame our ill decisions, but realizing that chance plays a vital role in any accident too can be liberating.

Meanwhile, the physicist Leonard Mlodinow of the California Institute of Technology suggests that “We can improve our skill at decision making and tame some of the biases that lead us to make poor judgments and poor choices…”

If we judged decisions by their potential outcomes rather than the particular result, we’d see how different the decision would appear to be.

Interestingly, our inability to both recognize or produce randomness can be our weakness. But taming it can be key to a peaceful mind where life itself can bring you the good and the bad when the time comes.