Luck is an interesting word that many people use almost daily. We all may feel that we have some sort of mystical luck, like a lucky number or a lucky object, such as a lucky bracelet, etc. When I was a young teenager, I felt like the number three was my lucky number. If things came in threes, then, of course, I felt like I had some kind of an advantage. Some say that if they find a penny, heads-up, on the street, that they will have a lucky day. Others say that if they step on a crack in the sidewalk it will be an unlucky day. Whenever good things happen to us we feel like we have been lucky. In converse, when bad things happen to us we feel like we have been unlucky. Some feel that luck is fickle coming from the term: “The luck of the draw.” Even when bad things happen to us, we sometimes feel that we were lucky. Why? Because we feel that the bad thing that happened to us could have been a lot worse. For example, I was reading a story about a young lady, Alice Sebold, who wrote a memoir about an event that happened to her in 1999. She said that she was finishing her freshman year at Syracuse University when she was raped while walking home through a park, off campus. She reported the crime to the police who remarked that a young woman had once been murdered in the same location. Thus, they told her that she was “lucky.” We often hear victims of accidents say afterwards that they were sure lucky—lucky to be alive based on the condition of their wrecked car.
Some well-to-do people appear to have most everything, and they are considered to be lucky by most of us. They may, on the other hand, feel unlucky because they don’t have or can’t have ‘every- thing’ that they want. There are things that they cannot ‘buy.’ They may not have the love of a person they would like to marry and be with, because that person cares for another. They cannot buy friendship. They cannot put themselves on a sports team without having the athletic ability to compete. They live on the defense because they know they are a target for thieves. There are certain aspects of having wealth that put a person at a disadvantage or that makes them appear to be unlucky to those of us who have less of material things.
Jason Mraz sings a song which include these lyrics: “I’m lucky I’m in love with my best friend, Lucky to have been where I have been.” Fortunately, I am lucky to be married to my best friend, who I have been married to for over 56 years. That doesn’t mean that best friends are always in sync and pulling the same load together and equally. It doesn’t mean that what she sees is exactly what I see and that what she thinks is the same thing that I am thinking. What it does mean is that we have more in common in what we see and what we think than we probably would have with anyone else. That is what makes us lucky!
The second line says: “Lucky to have been where I have been.” We should all feel lucky to have been where we have been. Where ever we go, we learn, whoever we meet, we learn from. We may not always be aware of what we have learned, but we can’t help but take something away from every encounter in life. I feel that I have been lucky to have been there. I feel that I have been fortunate (lucky) to have met good and great people—people that have taught me things about life, about me and about love.
I was born in a period of time when the country was in the great depression and soon at war (WW II), a time when most families experienced hard times. Those who went through those times and survived were lucky to have experienced those years when the whole country came together for the war effort, a time of great unity and patriotism. Good times are not always the times we learn most from one another, nor are they the times that provide our dearest memories. We were ‘lucky’ to have experienced hard times.
Channing Pollock described: “The only good luck many men ever had was being born with the ability and determination to overcome bad luck.” Some men and women claim that they make their own luck. In other words they don’t believe in ‘luck.’ If anything good happens to them, it is because of something they did to make it come out the way they wanted it to. You won’t see those people in a gambling casino, because they know that in that environment they have no control, or no luck. The most important thing I have learned about luck was described by someone as, “The harder we work in life the luckier we become.” And it is very true that “a little luck goes a long ways.” May God bless us to live such that we will always feel lucky.