Aren’t I Lucky?

I’ve never believed in luck. It was always something else.

“Some are just born under a lucky star,” I’ve heard. Some people appear to have life handed to them on a silver platter, but chances are you don’t see the times when they aren’t so lucky. The times they tend to keep hidden in the background.

Others appear to be playing with a pair of loaded dice. Manipulating the world around them becomes second nature. All it takes is one low roll for the cheater to get cheated. Everything they’ve “worked” for, all of it, comes crumbling down around them. Casinos bank on it.

You could go around letting a coin decide your fate. 50–50. Yes or no. Heads or tails. Ultimately you decide what each side means, rendering the coin flip arbitrary, and therefore useless. Whatever the result, you’ll still be disappointed if you get the option you didn’t want and elated if you get the one you did. But go ahead, pull a Harvey Dent and lie to yourself to give yourself a semblance of fairness. Heads, I win; tails, you lose, right?

“Aren’t I lucky?” I look down at the newborn in my arms. One of the innumerable potential lives to join this mess of a world. What the universe has in store for them, we can only guess.

“Work hard and make your own luck,” I’ve also heard, and there are others out there who do it. Hunters take classes to learn how to sneak and stalk their prey, how to take care of and safely handle their weapons, and how to clean, butcher, and store the meat. A good-sized elk would feed a family of five for a few weeks at least. Those looking to better their position in life go to the local university and study for months. But university’s expensive. Sometimes you have to go the harder route, which is one reason why libraries haven’t become obsolete yet. Be wary though. Some bosses take note of the hard work done to get that promotion and expect even more out of you if you want to get any further.

You shouldn’t give up though. Even one-hit wonders keep working on the off-chance they get another hit.

“Aren’t I lucky?” I wipe the sweat from my brow and rub my back. Looking over at my partner, I smile, watching them unpack dishes to put them in the cupboard. It may be a small 3rd floor walk-up, but it’s home, and it’s ours.

In Buddhism, the ancient concept of karma is one of the ruling principles. It is an intentional action that leads to consequences of equal or greater karmic action. It even determines how a soul is reincarnated. “One good turn deserves another,” some say. “An eye for an eye,” say others. Or it could be something in between. It all depends on how you look at things, I guess.

Celtic Paganism has something similar. They have the rule of threes. Do something horrible and you can expect to suffer three times the consequences. Do something good and you will reap three times the reward. That always seemed a bit selfish to me. Things are almost always done with some kind of intent. Wouldn’t planning a good deed ahead of time, and then going through with it, with the intent of reaping a high reward actually come across as karmically negative? It might be a situational thing.

Christianity, too, though they don’t call it “karma”. They call it the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Generally a good philosophy on paper, in practice it can be easily soured. First impressions are seldom positive. Greeting someone politely only for them to bark at you can be a good first step in a bad direction, and it most likely isn’t even your fault. Maybe they’ve just had a bad day.

The duality and balance of karma is fascinating. It is, in and of itself, Order, and works hard to control all of us scrambling through our infinitesimally inconsequential lives. But Order gets tired.

“Aren’t I lucky?” I sit back down from going to the bathroom and spot the waitress walking away from our table with my date’s debit card poking out of the ticketbook. I reach for my wallet but my date waves me down. They’ve got it apparently. The tip too. That’s fine. The only cash I had, I’d dropped in a homeless person’s box on the way into the restaurant. I had enough on my card, so the five bucks was nothing to me. I smile. My date truly is a beautiful person.

One of my favorite television quotes is, “What do we say about coincidence?” “The universe is rarely so lazy.” But is it though? Coincidence is Order’s carefully uncontrolled twin. Coincidence is random. Coincidence is the everyday unnoticeables.

Getting an extra egg in my tonkatsu ramen when human error could have just as easily given me none is something that could be considered good luck. Tripping on that one corner of the cement that was sticking up and breaking my sandal even though I’ve walked this path hundreds of times is something that could be considered bad luck. But it’s not luck. It just happens. Shit happens.

I love that poster.

“Aren’t I lucky?” I scoop up the five dollar bill on the curb. It could have been just another leaf, obviously missed by everyone else that passed this way. Except me. I pocket it and smile.

I don’t believe in luck. I believe in life. And life happens whether you want it to or not. Why fight it?