It is common for someone to message me to say how lucky I am to be with Maria, to live on my farm, to have beautiful dogs and sweet donkeys, to be living my life, taking my photos, writing on my blog.
I always twitch a little bit at those messages, like the one I got this morning: “I know you’ve had some troubles along the way, but don’t you feel especially lucky, you always say that you have the life you want. How lucky can anybody be? I’m not that lucky.”
I guess my little secret is that I don’t believe in luck, I never have.
I believe in work, struggle, and determination, just like Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Shallow men believe in luck or in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect.”
Everything I have, I worked hard for, I don’t believe the fates did much for me, except put me in the same small town as Maria.
When someone tells me I am lucky, they seem to me to be suggesting that the things that I love or are important to me just fell on my head out of the sky. I can’t say that’s what they mean, only what I feel.
Nobody ever will – or needs to know – what I did to have what I have. A woman e-mailed me the other day to write and admires and envies Maria, she says she has the most wonderful and perfect life – love and work – she is one of the luckiest women she knows of.
But I know the price Maria paid and pays every day for what she has worked for and wanted. I know that luck had nothing to do with it, she works herself to the bone day after day with discipline, passion, and commitment. She doesn’t look for sympathy or pity, she looks for fulfillment.
And she has overcome great anxiety and struggle.
I don’t know many people who do that.
All my life, I’ve seen myself as fortunate. I don’t live in my losses, I live in my hope.
I’ve always had food, shelter, work that I love, I have not suffered famine, war, crippling illness, genocide, or losses due to natural disasters. Every time I watch the news or hear a refugee child tell stories of the refugee camps, I am reminded of how fortunate I am to be an American and live where I live.
Luck, wrote Hunter Thompson, is a “very thin wire between survival and disaster, and not many people can keep their balance on it.” I sure didn’t.
It is a popular cliche to say you get what you pay for.
My idea is that you get what you work for.
Thomas Jefferson wrote ironically that he was a great believer in luck, and he found with some irony that the harder he worked the more luck he had.
I never know what worse luck my bad luck has just saved me from. I learned early in my life that sometimes not getting what I wanted or wished for was the best luck I ever had.
And one person’s good luck is often another’s trouble: “I think we consider too much the good luck of the early bird,” said Franklin D. Roosevelt, “and not enough the bad luck of the early worm.”
Luck is not chance, it’s toil, wrote the poet, Emily Dickinson, “fortune’s expensive smile is earned.”
In my life, “bad luck” often leads to self-awareness, necessary change, empathy, and perseverance. “Bad luck” challenged me to get help when I needed help and bludgeoned me into seeing the truth about myself.
I can’t really even say what good luck is and what bad luck is, or draw a clear line between them.
I am happy, but I am also sad, to me, that is a life in balance. And that is life.
I am angry, I also feel joy. I am safe but fearful. I am hopeful but know despair. I don’t believe I was ever meant to be happy all the time. I’ve never tried to hide from or avoid the reality of death.
Pain and sadness and loss do not shock me, they are part of life. Nobody gets a free ride, and we all fight our demons and battles.
I appreciate joy when I find it, which is often.
Life is never simple, even the best life is often hard. I am grateful for the good things and accepting of the bad things. One defines the other, luck doesn’t fit into my equation.
A Bahamian hurricane victim said on TV the other day that he was sitting on his patio deck on a beautiful beach one day congratulating himself on his good fortune, and the patio and the beach were gone the next morning.
If I could wave a magic wand and be happy all the time, I’d throw the wand away. What a dull and pointless life, without “bad luck” there could be no “good luck” or good fortune, one would simply bleed into the other.
We would have no reason to think, grow, learn or change.
I will be honest and concede that I believe luck can be a refuge for the lazy, an excuse for incompetence.
Every important lesson I’ve learned in life came after experiencing what many would call misfortunate or bad luck. So is bad luck really good luck after all when that happens? And if you believe in one, don’t you have to believe in the other?
I guess when it comes to luck, I make my own. Nobody hands it to me.
In a sense, “luck” is quite predictable. If I want more luck, I take more chances, I work harder, I get active, I make more mistakes, I show up every day.
We live in a vibrational Universe. Every thought we have has a vibration and adds to the creation of our life experience. We are creating our life in every moment either consciously because we understand the process or by default because we don’t, but creating it non the less. I believe that the largest leap in the evolution of mankind will be an understanding of this very process and how to consciously tap into it. Even in knowing and understanding it,
it takes great intent and focus to rise above the tide of our present mass consciousness and be the true Creator one is meant to be. There is no such thing as luck. You and Maria have created a wonderful life experience and I heartily applaud your success.
Nice thought, Wendy, well said I think..
we all show up everyday.Some of us have the life we have, and some of us have the life we create. You have created a good life for youself. You are lucky in that sense. You work from home, and do good works of your choosing. All admirable..
That is where you are lucky. To have the freedom to choose. Most people don’t. Most people have a 9-5.
Or work in factories. I feel lucky everyday, that I have the life I created, and that I don’t have to work in a factory.
This is what I think people are saying to you, when they say you are lucky.
Thanks Donna, nice note I’m sure some people are saying that, but most, I think, are saying I just got lucky, they don’t seem to mention awareness of what goes into that. I can’t say for sure what is in people’s heads, but I believe many people think luck is a determinant of happiness,and I don’t agree with that.
This is an interesting post. I too believe that you create the outcome you want. I’ve had people comment how lucky I am to have a teachers pension. I tell them I am not lucky. I put myself through college, took additional courses (Paid by me) to increase my pay, and worked 32 years to be able to collect what I and my employer contributed to the pension system. I suppose it is about choices. I think where I have been fortunate, is that I did not encounter the type of systemic racism, bigotry or sexism that is encountered in many professions. I really enjoy reading your blog.
Thanks Deb, I think yours is an important and powerful message. You made your own luck, you are admirable and certainly fortunate to have a pension, but the gods didn’t hand it to you, you went out and worked for it…I appreciate your message very much.
Without cold we would not appreciate warmth. Without sorrow we would not realize joy.
Without tired muscles we could not comprehend the delight in an accomplishment.
That which comes from the most effort is the most treasured.
So yes–you have it right. Luck has nothing to do with it.