1. The bridge collapses just as you cross over.

2. At the last possible moment, the life guard rescues your drowning son.

3. You leave your spouse after nearly twenty years of marriage.

4. You purchase the winning lottery ticket and retire early from your dead-end job.

When you translate the sensory input of your lived experience into narrative form, it is happenings such as these that you mark as events. At the moment of experience – at the moment when the lifeguard’s body breaks the surface of the water – the data that eventually will comprise your narrative are only a fraction of the sensory data to which you are exposed. The smell of chlorine, the rough touch of concrete on bare feet, the slight shift in the sunlight as the clouds move overhead: your conscious mind attends only to a subset of such impressions. It is drawn to the novel, to the variable, to the unexpected.

Even that subset of data on which, in the moment, you focus, far exceeds what you will recall when you narrativize your story. The lottery tickets that did not win, although they may have captured your attention momentarily, are, no less than the movements of the clouds, nonevents in the story of your life.