I think a lot about luck. Mostly because I don't seem to have any. Not just good luck - thankfully, I don't have much bad luck either. I guess you could say that I'm stuck in luck neutral.
I look around and I see people who have spectacular luck - whether it be good or bad -and I wonder how that happens. How does it happen that someone is either in the right place at the right time ... or the wrong place at the wrong time?
So many of the stories I read after 9/11 were about people who were not normally in the World Trade Center, but were there on that fateful day. And then there were the people who should have been there but weren't because some circumstance delayed them. A flat tire. A missed train. A lost job. And I wonder why.
Many years ago there was a mid air collision between two planes over New York. My cousin was supposed to be on that plane. He had his ticket to return home from college, but he changed flights over the objections of his friends and family - even the ticket agent - so he could fly home a day earlier. Everyone told him to wait and take the morning flight the next
day. He had an afternoon exam and would really have to rush to make the evening flight, but he was homesick and did not want to stay in Ohio one more night.
Had he listened to everyone else, he would have been on that doomed flight.
Afterward, we all asked him if he had some sort of premonition, but he said, "No." He just wanted to come home.
Luck? Fate? Something else? Who knows.
Who knows why someone buys one "Quick Pick" lottery ticket and wins 10 million dollars, while others buy tickets faithfully and never win more than a few bucks. Some people have even won prizes over a million more than once. How do they do that?
So many actors, artists, writers labor in anonymity for years before they get a break, but some else gets a major movie on their first audition, or their first book is sold to the first editor who reads it, then becomes a best seller. Wrong place; wrong time. Right place; right time.
I hear people talk about hard work paying off. Or they proclaim that you make your own luck. Perhaps this is true in some cases, but I don't think it's true in all cases.
So what happens with luck? Why do some seem to have it in abundance - either good or bad - while others seem to have none?
I've come to the conclusion that luck flows like the jet stream or water, leaving some people in a desert, while others flourish in verdant splendor - or perhaps in a rushing torrent that destorys everything in it's path.
.
And others like me stranded somewhere in the middle.
If you live in a desert, you can move to an area with more rainfall. If the jet stream brings you freezing temperatures and lake effect snow, you can move to Arizona or Florida. But what can you do to change your luck?
Is luck, or lack of it, something we can change at all?
I ponder this question as I head for the convenience store to buy yet another lottery ticket, but at the same time I look over my shoulder warily because I certainly don't want to trade my neutral luck for bad.
Posted by Cyberkat at January 16, 2002 1:37 PM | TrackBack