(I think this was supposed to be the intro to an essay, but I got back from the conference, and got on a poetry kick, the results of which are recorded on this site.)
The universe is mind-bogglingly massive. Its existence, especially its existence as we know it(as opposed to any other possible universe, if any others are truly possible), provides enough material for an eternity of rapt contemplation. But add time to the universe, and you have an infinite imagination-filler multiplied by an infinite number of time snapshots. For one outside the icy grips of time, a fragment of such a snapshot would provide mountains of study, but we who are constrained by the boundaries of space and time cannot even aspire to understand the small half-pinhole of our own part of the human experience.
Nothing that happens to us can be traced through the maze of causality. While we can perhaps see the beginning and end and even a few landmarks, our lives cannot really be explained in the full regality of a detailed cause and effect list. The actions of a single ant may effect the reign of kings, and locking keys into the car could do something crazy like enabling two brothers to meet unexpectedly at the same rest stop in Ohio(as happened while I was writing). Just walking down the street has huge consequences for the future. If you had not walked down the street and instead would have driven your car, a multiplicity of things happen differently than they would had you walked. Tipping your hat to a passerby may have a profound effect on him or his posterity's third cat. Not wearing the hat may influence them to never get cats at all, or perhaps only get two.
Weird claims, I will admit. But very true claims. While few occurrences can be traced directly to a single incidental cause, it is such a multiplexity of things (as a Behavioralist would overboardedly state) contributes to the happenings of life. It is the very incomprehensibility of such interconnections of ``chance'' that do make life so weird.