A little chaos, a little patience, a lot of monkeys

Tensions are mounting. This week has been one long series of small gut punches. We’ve lost our iconic downtown bakery—a disappointment in the second derivative..

We have endured deliberately opaque travel plans from the governor, with the added tease of a possible cabinet secretary’s visit, none of it confirmed or denied by the communications shop in Lincoln.

Meanwhile we watch a lawsuit unfold between 13 of our neighbors and the missing Governor. The tensions are all exacerbated by the attentions of national media, all against the backdrop of the second-longest federal shutdown in U.S. history.

Does it surprise anyone that moods are souring?

Old alliances are creaking. Patience is fraying. People who used to finish each other’s sentences are now reading between each other’s lines. When information is withheld or slow to emerge, people fill in the gaps themselves and rarely with their most charitable interpretations. It doesn’t take much in a small town for frustration to ripple outward, gathering speed as it moves.

Moments like this are when it helps to remember that improbable things can happen—sometimes not in our favor, but just as often in ways we can’t yet see.

A little more than a century ago, in 1913, French mathematician and politician Émile Borel published Mécanique Statistique et Irréversibilité, in which he pointed out a deceptively simple truth: if something has a nonzero probability of happening, and you repeat the experiment endlessly, it will eventually occur. He meant it as a mathematical illustration, not a cultural meme.

Over time, however, the idea escaped the lecture hall. It was Arthur Eddington in 1928 who gave it its most enduring image: a thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters, eventually producing the complete works of William Shakespeare. The idea was so absurd, so vivid, that it caught on in a way equations never could. It became cultural shorthand for the improbable, the ridiculous and the mathematically inevitable.

We didn’t all learn about this in the classroom or even from a motivational speaker. We first encountered it through pundits like Steven Wright, the deadpan philosopher of the absurd, who added his own layer of wit. He paraphrased Eddington saying that if you locked enough monkeys in a room with enough typewriters, sooner or later they’d produce Shakespeare. It’s a one-liner that has lived rent-free in the public imagination for decades, popping up in sitcoms, speeches, and social media memes. People may not remember Borel’s equations, but they remember the monkeys.

The odds of a monkey randomly typing out just the opening line of Hamlet are astronomically small—functionally zero in any human lifetime. But over infinite time, probability insists that it would happen and not just once. It would happen infinitely often. That gap between theory and lived experience is what gives the metaphor its staying power. It’s both absurd and technically true.

Which brings us back to the present—our thin patience, our fractured tempers, our missing pastries, and our unanswered questions. The mood may be heavy, the news uncertain and the politics unnecessarily murky--but we have a choice in how we carry it. We can let the weight of it crush our sense of humor—or we can acknowledge the chaos, take a deep breath and let the monkeys do their work.

We don’t need infinite time. Just enough of it–and perhaps, different monkeys in charge.