I often consider myself a very lucky person in different ways, to the point that it feels as if fate sometimes looks down at me at opportune moments and says:”This one will be lucky!”
It’s hard to explain why, but the universe has given me opportunities to have things happen in greater numbers than I might expect given what I know, have, or have been able to get given my disposition and nature.
Some people don’t really believe in luck – they think that the universe and how it shows up is always a result of skill, preparedness, or some combination of the two; to these people, relying on fate is almost irresponsible.
I see this as the nature of my cello teacher, Timmy – someone who recommends that we practice until we ‘cannot get it wrong’ – where the natural consequence would be to get it right rather than to err in the moment; I see this as the characteristic professed by those who are both good and have the prospect of becoming better in an ever-continuing loop, whatever profession they may have.
But realistically, I think that’s at best an approximation to what reality is going to hand out as part of her card game – in a cello performance, you could break a string; a baseball could fly in from a broken window and destroy your cello even though baseball isn’t played in this country; you could do every single math problem right but then maybe the exam papers are torn apart by zombie sheep in the middle of the night hiding in the school compound – who knows???
None of that is to deny skill, to deny practice – but neither is this an attempt to say that we should scream to ourselves that luck isn’t real.
Was it by skill or by luck that I’ve managed to appear on former Ministers’ podcasts at this point, invite people to speak with me of strange yet legendary ilk, get the police to subscribe to me on YouTube, have multiple Ministers aid me in complaints directly, criticize multiple people with no apparent issues, push freedom of speech to what seems to be the absolute hilt in this place we call Malaysia, and to just go forward in life with no apparent cognitive dissonance or fear from the unknown unknowns of this world or reason to feel any of that?
I would imagine that part of it was by skill, but spiritually, it feels to me to be more like luck – like all of the things that have happened recently, I want to say didn’t happen because I deserved it even though maybe a little part of me (maybe a big part of me) deserved it by the intelligent choices that I made over the course of time – choices that I suppose make me a bit of an odd duck.
It is nice to think sometimes that you are not responsible – and the ambiguities of luck and chance in this complex universe sometimes allow us to paper over what had really happened in ways that we may believe but cannot prove.
I want to believe that all of it happened in a dream – that somehow I had coasted and it was the inevitable result of living, breathing, existing; but can a person really say that when a little part of them is moving forward as quickly as they can, ignoring most if not all external feedback?
