I spit on the sidewalk today and it landed right in the crack between the slabs. I knew that had to be a good thing somehow, remembering from grade school how stepping on cracks was a bad thing or it meant you wanted to kiss the girl with buckteeth.

Later, I was unlocking the newsroom, thinking of how I mumble, and I heard someone in the coffeehouse say the word “mumble.” Something clicked about that—when the static chaos life seems to sync up in even the smallest details.

You think of a song a second before it comes on the radio—the light changes just as you’re coming at it.

I was at a bar last Saturday. A basement bar with license-plate-topped tables, a dirty floor, the walls covered in ads for specials they weren’t offering anymore, and a jukebox. It was my turn to pay the dollar for four plays. I put the dollar in and punched in the album code for The Doors and before I could get the song code in I heard rain, and then thunder.

The opening bass of “Riders on the Storm” started. Then those first clean notes from the keyboard.

The song is the perfect articulation of the human condition. My father, a devote Catholic and fiscal conservative told me this when I was too young to understand how right he was.

It all there right down to the phrase. There is a darkness, a hopelessness, a mystery. Morrison sings it slowly—nothing breaks pace. We’re here now and we’re riding it out.

The barroom was thick with smoke and I sat down. There was a mystery here beyond coincidence—how sometimes the exact things we want happen almost in response to our will. How that song played right then when I wanted it.

We’ve shaped our belief systems like this, finding the things that must be good. Albert Einstein said the most important question we could ever ask is “Is the universe friendly?” The evidence can be hard to find. Theologians have developed theories of suffering and moral equations.

Looking for a method of the universe is an attempt to get the spit to land right in the crack as much as we can—like praying for those good things that can only happen without our trying. We want the world to be graceful and our intentions to be blessed.

This thing we’re tossed into, this existence does have its moments: watching a cloud turn blue with lightning from your bedroom window or hearing the wind blow through the sill. But as long as were made out of the same stuff as the rest of this place—we’re exposed to its violence, its storms.

When it won’t be quelled and the thing just keeps bearing down on you, you can be like Morrison and write a song about it. Give someone else the insight you’ve had worn into you. There’s nobility in that.

Those insights can slow it down for someone else. Some kid standing in front of a juke box, spitting on the sidewalk, waiting at a red light, wanting to know things. We need those moments because grace isn’t how this place works; it’s only what keeps us moving.

Out of the darkness there seems to be a shift in existence. The churning calms long enough to see to the bottom. Though we’re never quite sure what we’re looking at.