One of the key ideas transmitted by the Taoist notion of "Way" (Tao) is that it is bigger than us.  The totality of all things unfolding in a moment of time is beyond our comprehension, certainly beyond our control.  A kind of fatalism flows from this: what might happen to us at any particular instant is also beyond our comprehension and control.  We may be fine now but then, a minute later, something unforeseen and terrible might befall us.  That is what Way is, that is how it works, and to get used to it, you just have to give up trying to control your life; you have to get free from expectation and desire, free from self:

Heaven goes on forever.
Earth endures forever.

There’s a reason heaven and earth go on enduring forever:
their life isn’t their own
so their life goes on forever.

Hence, in putting himself last
the sage puts himself first,
and in giving himself up
her preserves himself.

If you aren’t free of yourself
how will you ever become yourself?

        Tao Te Ching, Passage 7

     These thoughts came to me today as I read the extraordinary story by Joe Sharkey in the NYT recounting the midair collision that he was involved in.  The small corporate jet he was riding in was clipped by a Boeing 737 at 37,000 feet over the Amazon.  The large plane plunged to earth, killing all 155 people on board.  The smaller plane, by sheer luck and fate, somehow remained intact; it landed at an airstrip not too far away and all seven people on board were fine.

     Sharkey reflects on the impossibility of his own survival:

A Brazilian military inspector standing by surprised me by his
willingness to talk, although the conversation was limited by his weak
English and my nonexistent Portuguese.

He was speculating on
what happened, but this is what he said: Both planes were,
inexplicably, at the same altitude in the same space in the sky. The
southeast-bound 737 pilots spotted our Legacy 600, which was flying
northwest to Manaus, and made a frantic evasive bank. The 737 wing,
swooping into the space between our wing and the high tail, clipped us
twice, and the bigger plane then went into its death spiral.

It
sounded like an impossible situation, the inspector acknowledged. “But
I think this happened,” he said. Though no one can say for certain yet
how the accident occurred, three other Brazilian officers told me they
had been informed that both planes were at the same altitude.

Why did I  —  the closest passenger to the impact  —  hear no sound, no roar of a big 737?

I
asked Jeirgem Prust, a test pilot for Embraer. This was the following
day, when we had been transferred from the base by military aircraft to
a police headquarters in Cuiaba. That’s where authorities had laid
claim to jurisdiction and where the pilots and passengers of the Legacy
600, including me, would be questioned until dawn by an intense police
commander and his translators.

Mr. Prust took out a calculator
and tapped away, figuring the time that would be available to hear the
roar of a jet coming at another jet, each flying at over 500 miles an
hour in opposite directions. He showed me the numbers. “It’s far less
than a split second,” he said.

     In "far less than a split second" the 737 pilot jerked the wheel away from the on-coming jet and 155 people died while seven others lived.  There is no explanation for why it happened just as it did, why the little plane was spared, why the seven lived.  It was just one of the innumerable things unfolding at that instant of Way.  The lives of the seven were not their own, and that is why they go on.