The passenger in seat 11A

Sometimes in life, inexplicable things happen.

These days, reading the story of the sole survivor of the Air India plane crash, I have confirmed this conclusion, thought or belief that I have felt so many times.

More than two hundred people died in the crash, including those on the ground who were struck by the aircraft. Were there any survivors? Yes.

One.

Only one person survived. And he walked away on his own. His brother, who was traveling right next to him, died. I repeat, in the seat next to him. He was unharmed. His brother was dead.

I have dedicated a good part of my life to thinking and writing about the luck factor. Alex Rovira and I, the author of this column, once defended it in the fable Good Luck (which went around the world and was translated into dozens of languages, selling millions of copies and reaching number one in sales in Japan and Spain, among others), that luck isn't a lottery, but a mixture of opportunity and preparation. That one must create the conditions for it to appear. That luck favors those who work, observe, persist, and persevere.

But how can that be applied here? Seat 11A wasn't a preparation. It was an assignment. Nothing more. There's no strategy, no merit, no opportunity. It's chance. Brutal. Pure. Incomprehensible. And that person who walks, alive, among the rest of the dead passengers, is forever marked.

I imagine the silence inside. The echo of each name that didn't make it past the survivor count. The weight of the impossible question: Why me? It's not a stroke of luck to celebrate. It's a survival that demands a story. An explanation that probably doesn't exist. Only time, and perhaps spirituality, will allow him to redefine that miracle without merit or blame.

I've always believed in destiny as something that is constructed. That our actions forge a path. But I also know that there are events that fall outside that path. That fall like meteorites on our heads. And in those moments, one can only decide what to do with what has been handed to them.

Will the passenger in seat 11A turn his life into a testimony? Will he feel he has a mission? Will he quietly withdraw from the world? Nobody knows. Surviving like this—in such a brutally random way—I don't know if it makes you lucky. Quite the opposite. Or something else: it makes you someone who has been asked a very difficult question by life.

Whatever I do from now on with that question… that is destiny.