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"The harder you work, the luckier you get."
I am, actually, a great believer in luck.
Not the "fate is out to get you" or the "fate is smiling upon you" sort of luck. I think Fate has better things to do than mess around with individual humans. And since it works on the "all of eternity" timeline, I doubt if it's vision is focused enough to pinpoint the lives of one or two puny humans. And isn't fate supposed to be this thing that is planned out forever in advance? If it's got it all planned out, why would it bother working on the day to day details?
Nor is it the "good things happen" and "bad things happen" type luck either. That's just life. Rabbits are fluffy and hawks eat them. It's a bad day for the rabbit and a good day for the hawk. Despite what Disney would have you believe one is not cute and innocent and the other evil and blood thirsty. One's food and the other's hungry. In a cold, long and snow-filled winter a lot of things die. But that doesn't mean "old man winter" is evil. Some people get cancer. Some get better. Some don't. That's the way it is.
Now I know that sounds cruel. But it's not. It's just nature, it's life. It's not sentient. With sentience, you have cruelty and kindness. Otherwise, you just have nature. It doesn't look around and say "Oh look, they've had three days of sunshine, time to make them pay for that good weather." It's not luck that makes the tornado hit one house and miss the next, it's physics.
No, the type of luck I believe in is more like the "chaos theory of luck" -- you know, the whole a butterfly beats it's wings and it rains, thing? Some people tend to attract odd happenings. Things just happen around them. All the time. But those happenings aren't by themselves "good" or "bad" until the people start interacting with them. Those interactions end up making the "luck" or "unluckiness" of the situation.
I remember several years ago there was this young couple out west who were travelling with their very young baby. They got caught up in a snowstorm and when the main roads were closed they decided to off-road it. Lost in the blizzard they got stuck and were rescued just in the nick of time. Sounds like they were lucky, right? Maybe, but not in the way the term is usually used. You see, they had just barely enough food to survive. How lucky was that? Not very, considering if you are going to off-road it in a blizzard food should be high on the list of things you pack. And once they left their truck, they found a cave just large enough to keep mother and baby warm while dad went off to get help. Lucky? I don't think it was so much luck as the simple ability to see and recognize a cave. The husband was enough of a country boy and wilderness guy to do that. Of course, had he not been that much of a country boy and wilderness guy, he probably wouldn't have decided to off-road it in a blizzard in the first place. Yeah, they were lucky. They were unlucky enough to decide to off road it and get caught in the blizzard and they were lucky enough to have enough survival skills to live through it.
Of course, it isn't always that individual or controllable. The above quote is from an Australian government official to their military who are over in Iraq. No matter how "good and hard working" you are, you still can die in a fire-fight or a sandstorm. And if the people around you are dead-set on dying, your chances are very slim. Still, the more "good and hard working" you are, the more likely you are to be "lucky" enough to make it out alive.
Perhaps it would be fair to say that I don't believe that luck is the result, it's the set up. In a roll-playing-game I designed once, I had "luck" be an attribute that you rolled for your character. They higher the number the more likely that your character would be thrust into odd and unusual situations. What happened in that situation wasn't determined by luck, but by choices and actions.
While I was typing this up, my program quit on me and I lost the entire post. Unlucky, huh? What if I would have saved it just before it crashed? Would that be considered lucky of me? I don't think so. You see, I know the program has a tendency to do that that, yet I didn't save it. I even thought about moving it to my word processor to save it, but I didn't. My luck is that my programs tend to crash unexpectedly. At very inopportune times. The "good" luck of saving before it happens or the "bad" luck of not saving it, isn't really luck at all, it's just the result of my choices.
If only I would have worked a little harder and saved my post, I would have been "lucky" enough not to lose it.
I am, actually, a great believer in luck.
Not the "fate is out to get you" or the "fate is smiling upon you" sort of luck. I think Fate has better things to do than mess around with individual humans. And since it works on the "all of eternity" timeline, I doubt if it's vision is focused enough to pinpoint the lives of one or two puny humans. And isn't fate supposed to be this thing that is planned out forever in advance? If it's got it all planned out, why would it bother working on the day to day details?
Nor is it the "good things happen" and "bad things happen" type luck either. That's just life. Rabbits are fluffy and hawks eat them. It's a bad day for the rabbit and a good day for the hawk. Despite what Disney would have you believe one is not cute and innocent and the other evil and blood thirsty. One's food and the other's hungry. In a cold, long and snow-filled winter a lot of things die. But that doesn't mean "old man winter" is evil. Some people get cancer. Some get better. Some don't. That's the way it is.
Now I know that sounds cruel. But it's not. It's just nature, it's life. It's not sentient. With sentience, you have cruelty and kindness. Otherwise, you just have nature. It doesn't look around and say "Oh look, they've had three days of sunshine, time to make them pay for that good weather." It's not luck that makes the tornado hit one house and miss the next, it's physics.
No, the type of luck I believe in is more like the "chaos theory of luck" -- you know, the whole a butterfly beats it's wings and it rains, thing? Some people tend to attract odd happenings. Things just happen around them. All the time. But those happenings aren't by themselves "good" or "bad" until the people start interacting with them. Those interactions end up making the "luck" or "unluckiness" of the situation.
I remember several years ago there was this young couple out west who were travelling with their very young baby. They got caught up in a snowstorm and when the main roads were closed they decided to off-road it. Lost in the blizzard they got stuck and were rescued just in the nick of time. Sounds like they were lucky, right? Maybe, but not in the way the term is usually used. You see, they had just barely enough food to survive. How lucky was that? Not very, considering if you are going to off-road it in a blizzard food should be high on the list of things you pack. And once they left their truck, they found a cave just large enough to keep mother and baby warm while dad went off to get help. Lucky? I don't think it was so much luck as the simple ability to see and recognize a cave. The husband was enough of a country boy and wilderness guy to do that. Of course, had he not been that much of a country boy and wilderness guy, he probably wouldn't have decided to off-road it in a blizzard in the first place. Yeah, they were lucky. They were unlucky enough to decide to off road it and get caught in the blizzard and they were lucky enough to have enough survival skills to live through it.
Of course, it isn't always that individual or controllable. The above quote is from an Australian government official to their military who are over in Iraq. No matter how "good and hard working" you are, you still can die in a fire-fight or a sandstorm. And if the people around you are dead-set on dying, your chances are very slim. Still, the more "good and hard working" you are, the more likely you are to be "lucky" enough to make it out alive.
Perhaps it would be fair to say that I don't believe that luck is the result, it's the set up. In a roll-playing-game I designed once, I had "luck" be an attribute that you rolled for your character. They higher the number the more likely that your character would be thrust into odd and unusual situations. What happened in that situation wasn't determined by luck, but by choices and actions.
While I was typing this up, my program quit on me and I lost the entire post. Unlucky, huh? What if I would have saved it just before it crashed? Would that be considered lucky of me? I don't think so. You see, I know the program has a tendency to do that that, yet I didn't save it. I even thought about moving it to my word processor to save it, but I didn't. My luck is that my programs tend to crash unexpectedly. At very inopportune times. The "good" luck of saving before it happens or the "bad" luck of not saving it, isn't really luck at all, it's just the result of my choices.
If only I would have worked a little harder and saved my post, I would have been "lucky" enough not to lose it.
