Good Day and Good Luck
I was asked a few days ago whether I consider myself a lucky person. And then my newly beloved blogstress, the brilliant Canadian-career woman/party girl-turned-insightful-full-time- mom, waxed eloquent on the topic. Apparently (shockingly!) the perception of luck has a lot to do with one's emotional outlook. When one is full of gloom and doom, one feels cosmically screwed. If one is full of joy, I suppose, then one would feel lucky. Yes?
I keep mulling this over. Of course, I feel extraordinarily lucky in the broad sense--to be healthy, to be surrounded by wonderful loving friends and family, to be safe, to be financially secure, to live in a beautiful city (touch wood at least five times). There are a million other "big picture" ways in which I am extraordinarily fortunate. But lucky? In the day-to-day way? Run-of-the-mill charmed? I don't think so.
I obsess about luck, about not opening umbrellas indoors, about black cats crossing my path, about breaking glasses (I shattered a water glass on Saturday, so maybe a big infusion of luck is due). And I often brood about how I'm not lucky--I'm the one cut out of a cute group photo, the one who spends a week on various tech-y websites to choose a laser printer that jams and stalls the instant it's installed, the one who orders not one but two bridesmaid's dresses from Ann Taylor and finds that neither fits and the one that eventually fits in the store is damaged and needs to be special-ordered. I wonder whether these types of things are dumb annoyances that I attribute to bad luck and smarter people attribute to life in general. Perhaps Lucky People experience these same frustrations--in the same proportions--but don't get upset by them.
When I'm stewing about (slightly) larger problems, and feeling tired of scaling the emotional/financial/professional barrier du jour, I wish and wail about getting a break, the assumption being that I've tried to succeed via conventional avenues and need an alternative boost from the universe. I think wistfully about people like my friend A.P.. He'll show up in a city after years away. He'll have no job or accommodations in place, but he'll end up in some random bar and bump into one person looking for a roommate and another person looking to hire him. (Whereas I, when looking for an apartment, looked at 13 different places and stressed out for months about the moving process. And am still not entirely satisfied. And career-wise, I have almost always job-searched for month after discouraging month. And even then not been entirely satisfied.) I know many people who went to one thing--a soccer game or a party--and wound up meeting their soulmates (Whereas I, having agonized about dating and breakups, and spent so much time and energy trying to find love, am still very far from romantically satisfied).
In writing/reading this, I realize I sound whiny and entitled. If I were in a better mood, I would see it differently. Either way, I'm really just trying to untangle this. I'm wondering whether lucky is the same as effortless or easy? Or fast? Is the experience of finding an apartment or a good job, or falling in love, lucky when it happens quickly, and just happy if it comes about after strife and suffering? Is something lucky or unlucky depending on the criteria involved? And is there really such a thing as luck at all, or are we really talking about hiccups and mysteries in the order of the cosmos--a jumble of justly allocated good and bad, just on different time tables?
Posted by Dori at 2:17 PM
2 Comments
Dori, what a fascinating blog! It lead me to think a lot about luckiness. I never think of myself as lucky or unlucky, but I have noticed that I think of myself as somebody who gets what I want. Thinking about this in the light of your blog, and some reading around on the internet, I’ve come to the conclusion that what I am is not so much lucky, but more optimistic. I don’t notice the bad stuff, so the good stuff stands out more. The dictionary says that luck is “an unknown and unpredictable phenomenon that leads to a favorable outcome.” I must say, I am always happily surprised by my good luck, but don’t think of disappointing things that happen as “bad” luck, just as normal life ups and downs.
However, there is a guy in the UK, Dr. Richard Wiseman, chair of the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom who has written a book exploring just this, entitled, “The Luck Factor.” Through researching people who believed themselves to be lucky he discovered a commonality: these people have almost no insight into the causes of their luck, yet their thoughts and behavior are responsible for much of their good. He further found that unlucky people tend to be more tense and anxious than people who are deemed luck, and believes that this anxiety interrupts their propensity for noticing things that are unanticipated. He says (and I quote), lucky people are “skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.” (You can read an interview with Wiseman on http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3335275.stm )
I agree with Jassy-- and also think that luck has do to with both taking risks and being completely open to the result.
Merriam Webster Online defines luck as both a force and as events and circumstances. So, is it bad luck to deal with ill-fitting dresses? Probably not- but being open to whatever dress happens to come along... well- that's the magic of good luck.
Love the blog Dori!
Ellen from Anchorage
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