We love to tell ourselves that we’re the true authors of our own lives, but if you sit in silence for five minutes and trace things back, you realize how much of this whole experience is a bit like a cosmic roll of the dice. You didn’t pick the year you were born, the parents who raised you, Every day we wake up trying to steer our little ship, but we forget that we didn’t choose the weather, the current, or the boat we were handed.
This is where the line between “luck” and “skill” gets incredibly blurry. We love to praise people for being disciplined, focused, or emotionally stable, treating those traits like moral achievements. But the ability to sit still for eight hours, resist short-term temptation, or bounce back quickly from a failure is tied to neurological hardware you didn’t engineer.
Is luck important in life, or is it only important because our control over reality is limited?
One time when I was fifteen, I had to sit with my grandfather overnight in the hospital. Other relatives came from time to time, so I was free to wander the halls.
I passed an open door and looked in. There were about a dozen kids in beds, some of them in bad shape.
It was the first time that I was slapped hard by the notion that there, but for the grace of God, go I.
Yeah, luck is important.
On the other hand, I’ve known people who worked hard and got ahead. It’s tricky not to think of them as at least partially responsible for their success.
If you want to be happy you need to remember that all lives end with loss but in between happiness is easy to obtain. Also remember that much of what happens to us is governed by chance: know it when it adds and when it subtracts, because what really matters is wisdom and friendship. There are no two lessons more important and more often forgotten.
I prefer the word “random.” Randomness is the rule of life.
A star exploded in a supernova 5 billion years ago in this area of space and eventually gave birth to a second-generation star, our Sun. Planets formed and on the third rock from the Sun life evolved and then so did photosynthesis and this put oxygen in the atmosphere and then aerobic organisms evolved and then they crawled onto land and eventually bipedal primates evolved and then they migrated out of Africa and developed agriculture and (and meanwhile the DNA that would eventually be the blueprint for me kept surviving) and … fast forward … my grandparents, both new immigrants to Canada, had my parents, and then my dad met my mom and they had me (and six others), and I happened to meet my husband, and ended up living here. Husband died of MS. Niece currently has cancer. Had to wash some insect larva out of my compost container.
All random.
Yes, of course, I made a lot happen in my life. But life has a way of throwing curve balls.
Rota fortuna. \to Regnabo \to Regno \to Regnavi \to Sum sine regno \to
Luck is the chanciness of things. You want to go to a movie. It’s at 8:00 PM, at a theater 2 clicks away. Will you cab it or bus it? Will you find a cab or catch the bus on time? Will you get into a traffic jam or will there be some other kind of hold up? When you arrive at the theater, will you be able to get a ticket? Has your wallet fallen out in the cab/bus? Will there be a power outage? Etcetera. These are all luck.