The football team I play in consists mainly of current or ex-employees of Morgan. Due to shortage of players we occasionally get outside people to play for the team - friends or acquaintances. There was this guy, about 40 years old and whose name I cannot remember, who played goalkeeper for our team a few times. Late last year he stopped playing for a few months. So when he finally joined us back, I asked how he had been and what had happened to him. He told me that he had an operation a few months ago to remove part of his intestines. Apparently it was quite serious. I asked for more details and found out that his intestines dried up and rotted. So the doctors had to remove parts of it. Guessing that it could be the effects of smoking, I asked if he had been smoking for a long time. He replied yes. So I told him that that was the cause of it. I asked if he was married and has children. He said yes, and the children were less than 10. I then suggested that for the sake of his children he should stop smoking.
Although he kept quiet and his head down after that, what caught my attention was the look of amazement on his face when I 'guessed' correctly that his problem was due to smoking. He must have been wondering how I could have gotten to the source of his problem so quickly because I barely knew him. I guess he must have been unaware or indifferent to the well-known effects of smoking, and only understand it when his intestinal problem was diagnosed as most probably due to smoking.
That led me to think to myself how all of us can be like him. Each day, our actions or activities may have implications to our future but because we are unaware of the possible effects and the effects are either not immediate or directly obvious, we go about those activities assuming that they are alright. And when the accumulated effect of those actions finally hit us later down the road, it was already too late. And we simply resign ourselves to it and say that it is fate. Attributing things to fate is but a quick and simplistic excuse. If we care to begin to be aware of our actions and learn from others' experience (especially the findings of science), there is a very good chance that we will begin to realise that there is a cause and effect to many things in life. Many of us just do not bother to notice them.
The above story was a very simple example of this phenomenon. It was nothing special about my observing that the cause of that man's problem was smoking - if one is aware of all the scientific/medical findings about smoking.
May be that also explains how fortune-tellers work. Find out about something it one's past, and predict the future based on the fortune-tellers' knowledge accumulated through observing what had happened to others. After going through a sufficiently large 'sample size', the chance of a correct prediction can be pretty good.
