Luck > Noun [mass noun] success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one’s own action. Oxford English Dictionary.
Not to diminish all the hard work I’ve put in over the years to succeed and fail—sometimes it feels like both happen at once—but damn, I’ve often been helped by pure luck. That’s right. Being in the right place at the right time. A windfall or losing everything. Good times or terrible times. A great life or nearly no life (some of the latter because of my own actions).
When I first wrote this essay, it had been after two and a half months of what I’d call a time full of many good actions, and some have left me wondering, What the hell? Back then, I’d been twice to the emergency room: once resulting in the Medtronic Pacemaker Model Number W3DR01 (Average Battery Longevity About 11 years Estimated as of 31 Jan 2024 [Good to Know]) being implanted under the skin below my left collarbone above my heart.
I would show you, but the scar isn’t quite ready for primetime.
The second time, during the week this was written, all the electronic devices I use to monitor heart and blood pressure started sending me strange and conflicting readings. So strange and conflicting that it caught my attention, leading me to call out, “Time to go back to the emergency room.”
The good news was that I came out of the emergency room okay—more than okay, I suppose, since my stability wasn’t really my doing. Thank goodness for technology and the doctors who use it. I could say I was lucky. I won’t claim I was so vain as to think it wasn’t a big deal. I’m accepting that there are some things in life you can control and others you just can’t.
I’m not claiming that supernatural forces are at work here (yeah, that’s not in my wheelhouse these days). And, of course, all of us should do everything possible to guide our lives with good information and sound decisions.
According to the Harvard Business Review, “Various sources suggest that the average adult makes 33,000 to 35,000 total decisions each day, including what we will eat, what we will wear, what we will say, and how we’ll say it” (A Simple Way to Make Better Decisions by Amanda Reill). That’s a whole lot of daily decisions.
I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve made some big mistakes, like terrible decisions. Decisions that had long-lasting negative effects—physically, financially, and mentally. At the time, I was trying to satisfy my pleasure-seeking urges. You know, if it feels good, it must be good. Yeah, not always. Sometimes, it might feel good, but you’ll feel terrible tomorrow. That bad feeling might last more than a night. Hell, you might be feeling it fifty years later.
But I digress.
Here’s one decision I don’t regret: I wake up at five o’clock every morning. I’ve written about my morning routine before. It is a deliberate effort by me to guide my decisions for the rest of the day by clearing my mind of unnecessary clutter and focusing my brain to be in a positive place so I can, with a clear head, be confident that I will make those 33,000 to 35,000 decisions in a positive and self-aware mindset.
If only.
I guess that’s where luck played a role. How can I explain this? Let’s see, I’m riding my old motorcycle down the Harbor Freeway without a helmet, going 100 miles per hour at one o’clock in the morning after a shift as a bartender. I’ve had a few (maybe too many) Jägermeisters, and somehow, with no control over my decision-making, I didn’t crash into a truck or car (I was the only vehicle I could see on the freeway at that time of night).
I’ll go ahead and call that luck. I already know what you’re calling it.
I can reflect on my entire life when I’ve been saved or helped by circumstances or people that appeared out of nowhere, completely unexpected, and maybe slapped me upside the head or took my hand and guided me through a minefield so I, one, didn’t harm myself or two, got through some of the toughest moments of my life.
Whether it was transitioning from seminary life to the real world, from having no life to building a career in radio and television, or from some insane existence to finally being at peace with itself (thank you, Sumi), man, you can’t tell me that I’m not the luckiest person in the world.
The hand of the universe, as Sumi likes to tell me, or maybe a rip in the space-time continuum that disrupts the flow of energy, upsetting the balance of life, death, good, evil, positive, and negative. And voila, the luck of the draw: once more, you’ve either escaped bad luck or entered the good luck zone.
Whew, that was close
My head these days is focused on using even lousy luck as a learning moment. I am at a time and place where my body is talking to me, probably more like shouting at me. Get your shit together! Slow down! Your body can’t keep up with your mind—the one trying to run a marathon when your body can barely walk around the block.
That’s going to be a problem I’ll have to solve. I’m so used to running life marathons at full speed, rushing around like a chicken with its head cut off, acting like a bull in a China shop, or going to college for eight years from sixty-seven to seventy-five during a time when I should be relaxing in a Lazy-Boy, a lawn chair on my front lawn, or a beach chair with an umbrella shading me while I read a five-hundred-page novel, fall asleep, and get my legs and arms sunburned because I forgot to put on sunscreen.
Yeah, that’s never going to happen.
So, I will need to find a different way to control my decisions so they’re all positive and accept that it’s been luck all along that has worked for me, not against me, so I can enjoy the life I have now.
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