Imagine being a little toddler being like 3 years old. You hardly have a memory and can barely grasp what is going on in the world. Your parents take on a boat trip for the first time in your life. You barely know what a boat is, but you sit there, watching across a large blue ocean; a large field of plain blueness. Nothing happens, it is just full blueness. It is a quiet day and the water is plain and quiet, fully ordered as far as your eyes can reach. You feel comfortable and relax while staring into nothingness. Then, suddenly, out of nothing, something large emerges out of the blue, a large creature, about twice the size of the boat, floating in the air with his monstrous body, in a shape you’ve never seen before. It has flaps like a bird, and a skin like a reptile. You haven’t seen anything like this before. It is completely random to you. Out of the blue, out of nothing, something emerged that you didn’t expect and couldn’t calculate. It was not in your model, not in your mind, not in your world. But suddenly it was there. You might be fearful you might be curious. What does it want? Could you ride it? Would it kill you? What does it mean when something emerges out of nothing? It means your model is not complete, it means you don’t grasp what is going on in this world. It has the upper hand because you couldn’t explain it, but does it understand you? Does it see you as a prey? From the moment it emerged, you tried to give it a place to understand what is going on. You associate it with a fish, with a bird, with a reptile, trying to give it a place. You wondered and searched for words, searched for meaning.

Then, mommy appears behind you. And she shouts; that’s a whale! A whale, it is a whale. You haven’t heard from that word before. But it does give a place in your brain. It does give some certainty. You still don’t know what a whale is, how it works, how it breathes, how it eats, how it exists. But it is a whale, that is clear. But you know that mommy said the word “whale” with quite a smoothing and exciting sound, implying that it will not murder you and devour you with his enormous mouth and gaping teeth. It is a friendly, gigantic creature, popping up out of nowhere, out of nothing, completely random.

Thoughts:
In our daily lives we hear the phrase quite often; “well, that’s random!” Usually we mean that it is something that is unexpected; “something out of the blue”. I like the the saying “out of the blue” because I believe it describes randomness quite accurately. That is what I tried to describe in this story.