I should be so lucky...
We all have a
perception about the nature of luck – what luck we have, the luck other people
seem to have, the way the gods of good fortune smile in this place and not that
one.
If somebody shoots at a target and they just miss we think, and often say,
“Oh
– Unlucky! How unlucky was that?!” and so on.
Luck is that seemingly intangible resource that we’re always trying to tap
into, because if we could only just have it – then we have an understanding
that that would be a sure-fire guarantee to us getting what we really want in
life, or at least in this particular part of it.
Our colloquial
parlance is full of references to luck – Good Luck AND Bad Luck. Familiar remarks
like,
“Best wishes and good luck with your
interview; exams; new date; the big match; operation; speech etc.” We’ve
all said and had them said to us time and time again.
Of course if you know you’re someone
who is not exactly blessed with good luck then these best wishes can easily be
pessimistically responded to, with something like,
“Yea thanks – although knowing my luck something awful will be almost
bound to happen!” Especially if you can’t find your lucky charm, your mojo!
And then, when we get to meet these self same people later, we’ll probably
end up saying, “Well never mind – better
luck next time.”
Then there’s that massive imponderable that either makes (or breaks) our
lives – the weather. “We were so unlucky
with the weather there last year,” or “The
wedding went really well and luckily for us the rain kept off until after the
photographs.”
Luck is always
implied as being something outside of us, and those of us that do seem to have
it – whether that’s good or bad luck – somehow seem to have found a way to let
it into our lives, or maybe we were even born with it! And even then, once it’s
in, there is an idea that we have to do things a certain way in order to keep
it in if it’s good or let it out if it’s bad. Lucky numbers, unlucky numbers,
black cats, ladders, horseshoes pointing upwards or downwards, omens, portents,
superstitions – they are literally everywhere.
Cheating the Unknown
We live in a
scientific and gadget filled world, and yet think how many people read and
follow their horoscopes. And with horoscopes, funnily enough, the more we look
for something, the more we notice it being there – or if it’s not exactly the
same at least something very much like it. Our facility to generalise, delete
and distort is very good in this regard. And because luck always starts outside
of us we try to steal a march on letting it in by getting to know about it
before it’s actually arrived!
I’m getting
changed before a match – I have a lucky peg or a lucky corner in the changing
room. If I can’t occupy these places for some reason or other then things are
already going wrong on this particular day. Now I’m going to start attributing
every discomfort, every feeling, everything negative that happens – to not
being in my ‘lucky place’. I might be even more obsessive than this; put my kit
on in a certain sequence, tie my footwear up a certain way – the possibilities
are only as endless as the limits of my imagination! These are massive pre-frames,
well before the competition has started!
We are always
trying to steal a march on luck, endeavouring to harness its resourceful ‘power’.
The Game
So – where’s this
all leading? Well, as luck would have it, years ago I chanced upon this game
called ‘Dicing with Life’. I suppose it was called that since there was
a parallel opposite with Dicing with Death, and it was a game about navigating
your life’s way through the world. You won’t imagine what I felt when I found
it, quite by accident, when I was rummaging in my uncle’s attic - for a pack of
tarot cards, would you believe!
It must have been inspired by the success of The Game of Life because there
were a number of similar features, but what made it rather surreal was the
inclusion of certain episodes in the game that can only be described as almost
Faustian in nature.
The mechanics of the game involved a player’s “Life” token, which was propelled
forward on the ‘temporal board’ by the throwing of a set of dice. At every
throw some of the dice accessed certain cards, which permitted the player to
add attributes to certain sections of his token, and to add to his wealth of
knowledge, experience, money, and to add to his health and happiness. There
were also certain configurations of resulting throws of the dice that caused
fortunate or less fortunate happenstances to impact upon the player’s Life
token and ‘silos’ of health, wealth etc.
And then there were these Faustian
moments, where the player’s morality
could be strengthened or traded!
It’s easy to see that such a complex game would not be too successful in the
marketplace – however, it contained all the elements of chance, luck, cause and
effect, and controlling our own destiny that we are ever likely to encounter in
real life. All, curiously enough, controlled by random throws of dice and
pick-ups of randomly shuffled game cards.
Anyone really
getting into such an addictive game might then find themselves stepping out of
real life and playing the fantasy game for real. And there are many times that we
might, if we only realised it, find ourselves Dicing with our own real Life, by
stepping out of it and trusting to luck or an excessive random throw of our
personal set of dice. Yet, all the while, failing to see the nature of how
things really work in paradise.
Alignment
We think we
know what is really going on around us, but in truth we are only aware of a
fraction of that. We can broaden our perspectives and our perceptions to make
that fraction slightly bigger – but it will still always be a fraction.
If we go up in an aircraft or balloon, or even to a mountain top, and then look
down upon what is happening beneath us we will see an ever changing sea of
events involving people, other beings and objects and environmental forces.
Let us remember that within the mind of every person in that vista there a
perception of what is going on around them – and for each and every one of them,
that perception is based on a fraction of the actual data. Remember, also, that
sat firmly in the middle of the formation of all these perceptions are the filters
(that delete, distort and generalise) of each individual!
Now, in terms of this overview I’d invite you
to take a look at Luck. Where is it? Do you have an awareness of it? Are there noticeable
patterns and alignments that can be construed as Luck?
Next, come out
of that overview and down into the mind of one of those individuals – and again
examine Luck. Not his or her luck at
this stage, just Luck per se. Now, are
there noticeable patterns and alignments that can be construed as Luck which may
(or may not) impact upon him or her?
It’s an
interesting exercise which I find keeps my feet firmly in the objective camp
where Luck and alignment are concerned. When I consider cosmic order and cosmic
chaos, I find that this alignment plays a significant part in all things –
including people’s lives.
Luck, appears to me, to be a particular alignment of events, objects, natural
forces and living things as noticed and interpreted by an individual’s mind.
Transit of Venus
There’s
recently been a Transit of Venus –
where there has been an alignment of Earth, Venus and the Sun. This has enabled
observations on Earth (and in nearby space) to be made of Venus passing across
the face of the Sun. In terms of our solar system, this is the last time such
an event can be observed in the 21st century.
There is a significance here to aid our understanding of the relationship
between alignment and luck – and once we can perceive our own Luck merely in
terms of an alignment of events, then we need never again be prisoners of our
own mental construct.
“Okay,” you may say. “This is all well and good, Pete – but how can I get to be more lucky,
to be luckier? I want more good luck. Show me how.”
However - does it work like this? You’re talking about Luck in the same way
you talk about Confidence! Yet, aren’t you really
after something for nothing, to arbitrarily tip the scales in your favour? Won’t
that be playing with the balance of alignments – the yin and yang? Won’t that
tip someone else’s scales the other way? Maybe the law of attraction should
really be about attuning to and understanding the nature of alignments. It’s
just a thought of course, all of it!
Conclusion
And as 100
years is only a small fragment of time in terms of alignment of just three celestial
bodies – so also are a whole range of alignments happening for us in small
fragments of time, repeating many times over. Every single day there are thousands of those
alignments which we are totally unaware of – and that’s how lucky we are. And
if we want to be more lucky, it merely starts with noticing more alignments.
So, to return to
common parlance, and really state the obvious –
"We don’t know how lucky
we are!”
