As a long time reader of Graham Greene, the topic of chance as it operates through these details in 'ordinary' daily life naturally appeals to me. I was reminded of a little epiphany I had sometime in my eleventh year. I was walking to school and, approaching a street lamp, I wondered if my life would turn out different if I moved around it on the left or on the right. Not a particularly startling memory I agree, but it was that little flash of childhood awareness that birthed the memory, and by extension, birthed a fragment of my adult self. Except that you chose whether to go to the left or the right.
Consciousness chooses what is to be significant.
We rummage in the wastebasket and pull out things that speak the already shaped syntax of our lives. What is spoken reveals consciousness to itself and defines the form it is to take. We are all the biographers of ourselves. What free will we have involves a moral imperative, one that requires us to read with honesty and accuracy our life as it has been written. To misread, and thus rewrite, defines the beginning of sin - and thus our tragedy.