LOOKING FOR LUCK

June 6th, 2020

Have you run out of luck?  Or have you just stopped looking for it?

What is luck?  Or rather, what exactly is a lucky occurrence?  Some boon or benefit has come our way.  Perhaps we’ve won some money, or there is a parking space exactly where we need one, or the boss is later to work than we are.

In each of these, and indeed in most lucky circumstances, the luck hinges on some sort of resource that has suddenly opened up to us.  The money we’ve won can be used to buy that thing we’ve always wanted, that parking space is a resource in terms of the time it saves us in order to look for another spot.

Luck, has less to do with some perfect alignment of factors than it has to do with resourcefulness.  When the chance resource at hand is obvious, we call it lucky, and when we can’t see anything at hand that can fulfill our need, we call ourselves unlucky. 

On top of this, there is a culture of feeling lucky or unlucky, and regarding one’s self as such.

Are you a lucky person?

What makes this the case?

There seems to be this eerie occurrence of people becoming lucky when they start to believe they are lucky.  Is this some sort of divine alignment?  It’s certainly easy and perhaps even tempting to think so, but there is a far simpler, pragmatic and easy solution to this little quandary.

People who regard themselves as lucky are more resourceful because they start looking at everything as a potential resource - a potential avenue where luck is looking to pour into life.  This simple shift in perspective raises a person’s agency because they automatically have more tools at hand in terms of potential resources than the person who is already convinced that the resources aren’t at hand.

Would you look for something if you were certain it wasn’t there?  Of course not.  And this is exactly how the unlucky person regards their circumstances.

The lucky person simply abandons such certainty and thinks: well maybe there’s something here to work with.  And that’s all it takes: to simply look around at one’s circumstances in terms of what it has on offer to be utilized, transformed, tinkered with and combined into a way forward.

What’s lucky isn’t the circumstance at hand.  It’s quite literally the perspective that is lucky, and the circumstance simply looks different when we use this perspective.