Chaos Theory Offers Reassurance

I'm reading an excellent book that is changing the way I look at things: The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science, by Natalie Angier. On Friday, for example, I was getting bent out of shape because of a stupid mistake I had made on a project I was working on. It was a quick fix, but I felt like a moron (even more so than I feel on most days). As I gazed out my window, brooding and chewing on my favorite red pen, I recalled Angier's chapter on Chemistry and the discussion of the laws of thermodynamics. I sought comfort specifically in the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time. I am not a scientist, obviously, but I understand this to mean that there is an energy actively working toward chaos. And while there is one right way to do things, there are infinite ways for that same thing to go wrong. Infinite ways. In other words, there are more than a billion billion ways that I could have screwed up that particular project and only one way that I could have done it perfectly. With such tremendous odds stacked against me, and an active energy in our universe working towards increasing those odds, it seems a damn miracle that I--that anybody--ever manages to do anything right. While overall this concept makes me feel hopeless and miserable, I admit to taking great solace in it on that particular morning.