The other day, when I was walking in my neighborhood, I came across a very unexpected phenomenon, a flock of plastic black swan lawn ornaments, picking at make-believe grain on a small patch of brownish grass near a street corner.

Were they swans or flamingos? Or geese? Did it matter? What could this mean?  I had to wonder.

The only time I saw anything like it was when I attended a friend’s fortieth birthday party. I remember his wife decorating their pristinely manicured, green suburban lawn with several similar-looking black birds along with a sign saying, “Lordy, Lordy, Jim’s turning forty!”

I guess black is associated with mourning and the implication was that one’s life is practically over when one turns forty. I know this not to be true.

Since the birds I saw this week had shorter legs than flamingos and because it was such a rare sighting, I decided to think of them as black swans, maybe the rarest of rare birds.

This past week, as I’ve continued to have discussions with friends about lessons we could glean from the November 3rd election. I repeatedly heard disappointment at election results.

Most of my friends expected senate races, and even the margin of the Biden Victory, to be more of a repudiation of what Trump stood for. Too often, that meant lying with no accountability, acting above the law, and an autocratic style of governing.

So many engaged citizens and political operatives wondered whether they missed something important in understanding public sentiment. They wanted to think that Trump and what he represented was an aberration, that he would be a one-term president and we’d flush him and his sycophants out of our system like a speck from our eye with a healthy spritz of Visine.

I thought about the election 2020 postmortem. Opinions were splayed out on cable news and aired in the course of phone conversations between friends relative to where we are as a country and where do we go from here…

…And, as I passed these odd lawn decorations, I couldn’t help but think about black swan theory as forwarded by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Before becoming an essayist and university professor, he was a trader. His work focused on probability, randomness, and uncertainty; how people can live in a world that they can’t readily understand.

There are three main aspects of black swan theory: 1) Black swan events refer to rare occurrences that can’t be predicted (World War I, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and 9-11 are examples); 2) Such events have a great impact on history;  and 3) after such an event, there’s a tendency for people to rationalize what happened in order to render them explainable.

While analyzing different influences of such events can be illuminating, finding a causal relationship is pretty much impossible.

There might be reasons why some people hunger for an autocratic leader, even to the point of rendering their voice in society less relevant, but paths for authoritarians to ascend to power are constantly changing. Can the possibility of cult leader coming into power be curtailed? I don’t know.

And how about the corona virus?  Other administrations have been concerned about the effects of a global pandemic and created playbooks to lay out some ideas of how a health crisis could be handled, but could the nature and devastation of this particular event have been predicted?

It seems impossible to have predicted that such a virulent disease would have cropped up just when the most extreme of science deniers held the highest positions of authority in our government.

I believe there are just some things that can’t be predicted. Sometimes, maybe all we can do is be surprised by an event, deploy resources for mitigating the worst effects, and strengthen our feeling of connection with other people who are also affected.

Through the most challenging of times, maybe the best we can do is maintain our humanity, our sense of self-worth, our impulses to extend compassion to others while holding our center.

Seeing a gathering of black plastic swans on a street corner is surprising.  It’s funny, and It’s jarring.

Considering that rare, unanticipated events can change everything; how we work, how we learn, how we socialize can be hard to wrap our heads around. Knowing that these events can be survived, even as we acknowledge the possibility of being changed forever requires hope and patience.

Accepting the unpredictability of life is no small thing.