Notes from Beyond the Pale
Every so often, I’ll hear on the news how someone was killed when a tree limb fell on him. Then I’ll always wonder why he didn’t hear the loud crack when it broke off, and then why he didn’t run. Next, I think maybe he did run, but in the wrong direction. And my last thought is always, “What bad luck.”
And I’ll also think, from time to time, about my father’s belief that luck ruled everything. For instance, although he was a jockey, he would never bet on the horses because, since luck ruled, he had no say in controlling the outcome, to make his bet a lucky winner or a bad-luck loser.
And I think of a young man I’ve known who would say, when bad things happened to him, “I’ve always had a black cloud hanging over my head.” He would say this over and over, and indeed, it was true. Bad luck seemed to dog him to the end, when he died at 42 of cancer this spring.
Luck. What is luck? How come some people have it and others don’t? Despite there being no scientific evidence that proves that luck is some kind of supernatural force, most of us feel, in the irrational deepths of our subconscious, that luck is some kind of entity, some kind of power. Humans all through history have believed in luck. Even Edward R. Murrow would always say, “Goodnight, and good luck.”
And look at all those lucky charms! From the Middle Ages, ladybugs have been thought to bring good luck. In China and Japan, cranes on your roof are believed to bring good luck. It’s the white elephant for Buddhists and Hindus. Then there are the crystals and certain plants and horseshoes and rabbits’ feet and the four-leaf clover and the lowly penny found on the ground —all are said to bring good luck. (Nobody picks up those pennies anymore, and anyway, the penny is being discontinued in 2026, so…bad luck for the penny, and one less chance for good luck for us.)
So imagine, you set out on your long-anticipated vacation. It begins to rain hard, really, really hard. A monsoon. Traffic is horrific. The kids are whining that they want to go home, and the dog keeps puking in the back seat. And then, when you’re miles from anywhere, the car engine conks out. You would call all that bad luck. But all the other days and years when the sun shone on a lightly-trafficked highway and the car purred along, you did not call that good luck. You just accept that as due to us. But bad luck is due us, too. To say, “I don’t deserve this,” is to say you think you’re special, high above us other schmucks trying to live a life.
We think of bad luck as something that we have no control over, as something that comes down upon us from…I don’t know…somewhere. We see bad things happen to good people. Good things happen to bad people. We think our luck happens outside of ourselves. It’s hard to believe that we have anything to do with our bad luck. But listen, the word for both the bad and the good luck you have is called LIFE.
Seneca, the Roman philosopher born in 4 BC, said this about luck: “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” Wow. Seneca said 2,000 years ago what many contemporary psychologists believe—that we create our own luck by being prepared as well as being smart enough to identify and welcome a good opportunity when we see one, AND to have the guts to act upon that chance. We need to be ready when an opportunity arrives. That’s how we make our good luck. So, for example, if we dreamed of joining the Paul Taylor Dance Company, and an opening became available, in order to actually be accepted, we would first have had to PREPARE ourselves beforehand by becoming an ultra-extraordinary dancer.
But what about bad luck? Do we make our own bad luck? Sometimes, I guess. We go 60 mph in a 25 mph zone, and we have the bad luck to get a ticket. We did that to ourselves. But the guy who got whacked by the tree limb? Did he cause his bad luck? Who knows? Maybe he’d have heard the branch crack in time to run if he were listening to the birds instead of wearing his earbuds.
So…there is no luck, only life. When my grandchildren were little and we’d go to the beach, whenever they found a lovely shell or a seagull feather and brought it to me to see, I’d say, “Lucky! Lucky!” And they would be happy to be so lucky. Actually, I’d say, “Lucky! Lucky!” for practically everything they experienced that wasn’t horrible. (I know, one of those insufferable Little-Mary-Sunshine grandmothers.) They are teenagers now, and they laugh and say, “Lucky-lucky” for all kinds of things. It’s a familect. Even if their cell phone falls in the toilet, they will say, “Lucky-lucky,” albeit with great sarcasm and irony.
So… maybe good luck is just a way of looking at things as being mostly fortunate. And maybe being coached from an early age to consider yourself lucky makes you…lucky!
I like what James A Garfield, our 20th President, had to say about luck: “A pound of pluck is worth a ton of luck.” Except that he got himself assassinated.
Now, there is some bad luck.
