The lunch line at the drive-thru inched forward. When we reached the window, the cashier leaned out and said, "your meal has already been paid for." I looked up startled, searching for the donor's car to thank them, but it had already slipped back into traffic. It was a small gesture, yet it carried a warmth that felt older than the moment itself; ...

Randomness frequently gets a bad reputation. It is treated as the messy drawer of human experiences, the place where we toss the things we don't understand, don't want to think about, or can't be bothered to organize, nor make sense of. We call something random when it doesn't fit the story we're trying to tell or understand. When it inte...