Do you feel lucky? Given you can read this, and possess a screen on which to read it, I promise you are: 14% of the world struggles with basic levels of literacy.
Luck is the operation of chance taken personally, and it comes in three forms – constitutive luck, ie. the luck of your character and personality; circumstantial luck, the luck of the time and place of your birth and lifespan – being born to the UK in a time of peace, for instance; and resultant luck, the outcome of how your choices and actions unfold.
You might have been unlucky in catching a train in Cambridgeshire last Saturday night, for instance, but lucky a swift-acting train worker intervened to save you from a man with a knife.
Your ability to read my drivel relies on circumstantial luck, even if you disagree. Without being born in this marvellous country of ours, with its expensive, universal, compulsory education system, you might miss out.
The fact you’re continuing to read relies largely on constitutive luck, in this instance your ability to endure moral philosophy with your favourite Kent-based news source. Nice one you.
There’s also existential luck, of course – the luck you exist at all, that your ancestors all managed to survive and procreate to generate you – the luck, indeed, that humanity exists, that the universe exists.
The odds against all of it are so overwhelming it makes me swimmy-headed. And to think I use that astonishing luck to moan I haven’t snagged my preferred parking space or my son’s eaten the last of the bread. What a dolt.
Much of life is shaped by forces outside our control. But your attitude towards these forces shapes your character, which in turn will shape what seems like luck.
You can’t control whether you become a published author, for instance but you can write every day, chase down every opportunity, and refuse to give up, despite almost insurmountable odds.
Or you can sigh and give up. Either way it’s not very likely, but it’s certainly likelier in the first instance.
Amor Fati is a latin phrase that means Love of Fate. It involves not only accepting all the dreary nuisance you get sent, every difficulty, humiliation and setback, but actually embracing said nuisance.
The idea derives from Stoic philosophy and was later picked up by Nietzsche. Instead of wasting energy wishing things were different, you learn to treat the bumps in your road as opportunities or gifts.
For instance. In a few hours I have a ninety minute appointment in the dentist chair for a dental implant.
I am dreading the pain and discomfort and the enforced consumption of soup, yoghurt and porridge instead of my preferred diet of pizza and crisps. I also rather resent that this painful interlude is to cost me £2700.
But the dread is a useless waste of energy and time in this, my precious finite time on earth. Instead, why not reframe it as a gift? This evening I’ll be let off some ghastly social engagement to be left snuggly on the sofa watching trash telly, hopefully still off my face on painkillers.
Magic. How blessed I am too that I can afford this treatment, afford to take a few days off work, thus sparing myself further and worse dental problems in the future: blessed to have found a decent dentist I trust to fix me.
I’m so lucky. Louder at the back: so damn lucky. And I need a decent set of gnashers if I want to be a megastar author, don’t I?
This is part of my path to success and realised ambitions, and should be embraced as such. Hell, maybe I’ll lose a few lbs on the soup and yoghurt diet too. This really is the afternoon that goes on giving.
Also, I’m a dirty devil, and My competent dentist is insanely handsome too. I read once that thinking erotic thoughts in the dentist chair helps with the pain because it sends blood rushing from the mouth. Maybe that’s true. Worth a go anyway. Perhaps it will distract me from the fragments of rotting bone flying at my face.
That kind of reframing doesn’t deny the difficulty, evidently. The dental appointment will still be hard, and recovery may well be painful and dreary (no peanuts for a MONTH? Seriously?) but it helps transform the meaning of it.
Instead of “why me?”, it becomes “lucky me, that this too is part of my path.”
Sounds nauseatingly Pollyanna-ish, I grant you. But amor fati isn’t trying to make you believe all life is beer and skittles.
It’s saying, this too is mine, and I choose to carry it as part of my story.
It’s choosing to believe fate is your ally rather than your enemy. It will make today easier.
It reminds me this pain has a purpose: it’s carrying me to freedom and success.
It can help to see fate as a river. You don’t control where it flows, but you can choose not to exhaust yourself by thrashing against it. You ride that damn river, even during the storms, and try to steer when you can.
