Climbing is a game of risk and luck. Preparation and experience will mitigate a large portion of that great unknown, but there will always be elements to the game that are out of our control.

I suppose that that’s precisely what makes any game worth playing.

But the reality is that all of us human beings are trapped into playing one great, big game of risk and luck, even if we don’t realize it. Think about our nonchalance to one of the most positively dangerous things we do on a daily basis: driving. It’s amazing how speeding down a highway at 80 miles per hour, mere feet from many other 80-mph-moving objects—all of which are loaded with flammable, explosive liquids, and operated by distracted, addled drivers yelling at Siri to play Kei$ha—can seem so positively boring.

We all stand a 1 in 98 chance of dying in a car accident over the course of our lifetimes, yet somehow this sobering stat does little to make us appreciate the sheer miracle that is surviving every drive to and from the crag.

Our luck is like our health in that we don’t always appreciate it until we don’t have it. This past winter I went through a spell of bad luck. A book deal seemingly fell through. House flooded (twice). I was sick on and off for months. I wasn’t climbing. Every time I thought to myself that things couldn’t get any worse, they did.

But another interesting aspect of luck is that it’s sometimes hard to know whether it’s working against you or actually on your side. The present pain of a tough situation often puts blinders on the clairvoyance needed to see that periods of strife are often catalysts for necessary change and growth.

For example: my fiancee, Jen, and I had been wanting to tear out the carpet downstairs because it reeked of puppy pee. Our hot-water heater went out last November, slowly leaked into the downstairs room and soaked the carpet. Mold grew on the walls of a closet. We had to replace the hot-water heater, and rip out the walls and carpet. We bought new wood floors, but hadn’t installed them yet. Two weeks later, a water filter—likely knocked during the heater’s installation—cracked like the top of a fire hydrant and filled the downstairs with two inches of water. Another disaster in as many weeks.

Fortunately, I was home that morning and turned off the water before too much damage was done. And to make a long, stupid story short, our insurance basically covered everything. We more or less broke even, getting the nice laminate floors that we wanted and a new hot water heater all for $100 out of pocket. What had seemed like such bad luck in the moment revealed itself to be quite good luck.

So, if we are apparently so bad at even recognizing whether our luck is bad or favorable, then what does that suggest about our ability to calculate risk? Especially if the two are somehow intertwined, as they often seem to be.

For example, my good friend Hayden Kennedy, who has survived some of the most extreme, dangerous, cutting-edge alpine climbs done in recent memory, just tore his ACL when he fell one foot (12 inches) in the bouldering gym. Ironically, this is the second time he has torn this ACL bouldering in the gym. It sucks to see someone so active bed-ridden for the next six months … but perhaps this ACL tear will be the reason that he doesn’t go to Pakistan and die in the mountains this summer?

I waver in my belief that whether or not we live or die, succeed or fail, has anything to do with our own volitions. Is it just vanity to believe that training, knowledge or experience play any significant role in our fates, especially when we continue to see some of the strongest climbers die, while other far-less experienced guys continue to dodge bullets all while being as blissfully ignorant as Mr. Magoo?

There’s a real dissonance between the reality of the universe and the dramas that unfold in our heads. We could be deathly worried about that looming serac, and feel as if we’re doing everything we can to mitigate that one dangerous question, but then meanwhile, something else, something completely weird and unexpected could go wrong.

For example, I went skiing in the “side country” in Aspen last week. Colorado has one of the most dangerous snowpacks in the world. It had just snowed. On the surface, it was a risky, arguably dangerous thing to do. But it was a great day; nothing bad happened. Then while driving home, I felt tired from skiing and was nearly falling asleep. I rounded a bend in the road with standing water from snowmelt; I felt my tires momentarily lose control. I jolted awake and regained control of the car. Again, it wasn’t a big deal; nothing bad happened.

But I wonder just how close I came to flipping the car. Thankfully, I’ll never know, but it could easily be that 1 mph faster, or 5 degrees too much steering, or 10 centimeters to the right or left, and my nice day in the mountains would’ve ended very differently.

It was interesting that just minutes later I saw police cars and an ambulance heading in the opposite direction, back toward that one dangerous bend in the road. Who knows what happened?

You can’t live your life getting bogged down by the What Ifs, however. Nor can you live your life over-calculating risks and evaluating luck because so often, you don’t really know why the universe works the way it does. For me, the book deal I thought I had lost seems to be back on; I’m happier work-wise and more energized to write than I have been in years; I’m not sick, and I can’t wait to dive into this climbing season. I think you just have to take it in stride and go with the flow and hope that your risks pay off and luck doesn’t run out.