A matter of luck

Everybody knows them.  Those people who always seem to fall on their feet, no matter what disaster overwhelms them.  They are made redundant, pick up a fat cheque by way of compensation - and walk straight into a better-paid job.  They are injured fairly seriously, and must take several months off work.  During that time they write a best-selling novel or invent a new D-I-Y tool which makes them a fortune.  A long-standing relationship breaks up messily and painfully; in process of picking up the pieces they meet the love of their life.  In a word, they are lucky.

Some would say that I am lucky.  Events happen to me which seem to defy all natural reasonableness.  Several years ago, I went skiing for the first time, I stepped on to the piste, stumbled ungracefully and fell over.  I staggered up and on, and then noticed that one of the lenses of my glasses was missing.  I stopped, walked back ten feet; there, half- buried in the snow was the lens.  More recently, having moved on from spectacles to contact lenses, I lost one of them.  Four days later, as was sitting down in a completely different room, I saw a faint twinkle amidst the pile of the carpet.  It was the errant lens.

Surprising perhaps; amazing, even; but not lucky.  Throughout my life opportunities have arisen at just the right moment; one door slamming shut knocks open several; lost things turn up impossibly.  And the reason for all this is simple and prosaic: I create the conditions where the unlikely is at least more likely.

By myself, I am unable to influence the course of events.  But I make sure that I can seize the merest hint of an opportunity should it present itself as, sooner or later it must do.  Subconsciously, I work with possible developments in mind, placing myself in the right position like a chess-player; I act as a midwife to the future.

I found the lens in the snow because I walked back, hoping to find it; I noticed the contact lens because my eye habitually rakes the ground for interest.  Everything I could do, I did; it needed only the seed of an opening and my "luck" flowered inevitably.

It is the same with those who succeed and succeed against all the odds and obstacles. The job or the novel happens because they strive for it; they never submit to a situation.  You may not control the details of your destiny, but you can shape it.  In this respect, far from being bound up with abject fatalism, such "luck" is its opposite.  Instead of passively accepting your life, you actively shape its landscape.

People invoke luck because it absolves them.  It spares them the time and the effort of husbandry; it avoids the burden of personal responsibility.  That they fail is bad luck, not their own inability to take control.  If others succeed, it is mere good luck.  And to succeed against all the odds is dismissed even more simplistically by invoking a yet greater luck.  In the end luck becomes like a childish explanation of everything, and about as useful.  Which is why those whom others regard as lucky are indeed lucky - but only because they refuse to recognise the concept at all.

(7.4.87)

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