The short animated tale “The Nova Effect” by Pursuit of Wonder tells the story of a man named Eric who lost his dog Nova to a taunting rabbit while they were out walking. After a few days, a lovely woman named Vanessa brought Nova back. Eric and Vanessa fell for each other and eventually became a serious couple.
While driving to pick up Vanessa one day, Eric got into a car accident. He was taken to the hospital and underwent a CT scan. The doctor told Eric that he did not suffer any injury from the crash, but they did find a small tumor in his brain. The tumor was in its very early stages and could be easily removed, yet without the accident and subsequent, Eric may have not known about the tumor until it was fatal.
While Eric has had his share of bad luck (losing his dog, getting in an accident), he also enjoyed a great deal of good luck that came out of it (meeting his love, discovering a curable tumor), demonstrating the incredibly random nature of luck.
A short fictional story about a series of events that cause the sudden appearance of intense change in a man’s life.
This thesis is much like the philosophy of Alan Watts, who once stated that it’s impossible to determine if the outcome of any situation will be good or bad until the future is fully realized.
…Maybe the whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity and it is really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad because you never know what will be the consequences of the misfortune or you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune.
