Luck / Unluck

A friend at our RsM badminton club recently fucked up his knee at a provincial tournament.  I’m not sure exactly of the details, but last I heard, it’s going to be weeks before he can even hope to walk, and months before it’s safe to play badminton.  By “months” it just means, not any time soon, we’ll see how it goes, but really most are doubtful it’ll ever be the same.  I mean, every time an injury requires more than a few days of recovery, there are lasting reprecussions, not matter how minor we may deem them.  And they add up.

It really makes you think about how ‘lucky’ we are really.  But luck, really, what is that?  And does it have anything to do with anything, given what definition we give to it?

I’ve always sorta held that luck is really something that you use to describe conditions that you’re ignorant of.  If you won the lotto, it’s not that you’re lucky in a magical fated sorta way– it’s more, simply, that you chose a bunch of numbers without knowing, and they were the right ones.  Is that luck?  I suppose– if you define luck as the intersection between your arbitrary numbers and not knowing what numbers the lotto company chose.

Luck in some sense has to do with success despite ignorance.

If, for example, you did know the lotto numbers in advance, you wouldn’t be considered lucky when you picked them– it’d just be smart.

Yet, if you didn’t know the numbers, you wouldn’t be considered stupid if you lost.

I’ve been pretty lucky in the past when it came to injuries.  I’ve never had a serious injury that required hospitalization, but considering the kinds of activities I engage in, that is luck– I simply that I don’t know how I didn’t get injured.

On the other hand, maybe luck is only about ignorance on one level.

I’ve got this bottle that says “Luck is my Skill.”

This can, sort of be true– I think that good execution in anything is a coincidence of preparation and opportunity.  It doesn’t always mean that you are consciously aware of what you are doing– it might be that it happens all on it’s own, and because you are ignorant of your own subconscious, you will do something ‘lucky.’

So I guess, there are two sortsa lucks.  There’s the external sort– where things happen around you, and you call it luck because you don’t know why something good happened to you.  Or you call it bad luck because you don’t know why something bad happened to you (or you do, but you didn’t know any way to prevent it).  And there’s internal luck–

Have you ever met people who seemed to be simply chronically unlucky?

Ever noticed any patterns in their behavior? Their way of life?

What about those who are lucky?

Do you think it has to do with how much understanding those people have with themselves and their surroundings?

Or do you really think that for some reason, God or Fate favors certain people?