“Not knowing when the dawn will come
I open every door.”

–Emily Dickinson

In the recent Indian movie, The Lunchbox, a lunchbox delivered to the wrong address sparks an unusual correspondence and changes the lives of the two main characters. (The lunchbox delivery service by the dabba wallahs of Mumbai transports over 200,000 lunchboxes each day, with mistake occurring only once in a million times. Here’s a video I found.) All of us have heard stories of a person who “was at the right (or wrong) place at the right (or wrong) time.” There are hundreds of movies, plays, and books based on chance encounters—for example, Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951) based on Patricia Highsmith’s novel. The reason why we repeat these clichés, and why these stories resonate with us is because they are so real. We’ve all had chance encounters; we’ve all experienced unexpected good…