Who out there believes in LUCK? Good or bad. I’ve always believe that you make your luck in life. But with my wife, it’s really difficult to disregard the idea that there lucky people and unlucky people. My wife is definately the latter!
Most recently she got rear ended by a 16 year old girl who couldn’t stop fast enough. The insurance company totaled her car. She has whiplash. The other night she was having a bad dream when she fell out of bed. As she was falling, her hand caught the electrical cord from the alarm clock, and jerked the clock off of the dresser. It smashed her right in the eye. Not only did she get a black eye, but it cut it too. A few months ago she had a mild grand mol (sp?) at the top of our stairs. She fell down our stairs and broke BOTH of her legs. I have to admit, I’m almost glad I wasn’t home at the time (my kids were there, don’t worry), because think I beat her or something! Anyway the list could go on and on. Just wondering.
I believe in “luck” like I believe in “ghosts”, “majick”, and “ESP”. That is to say, something is going on that I (and anyone I have talked to) don’t understand.
Most of it can and is written off as suggestion or perception, but if a person who doesn’t believe in “luck” has more frequent mishaps than his/her companions, then I kindof start to wonder…Of course, frequency can be written off as subjective memory.
For a dangerous but fun experiment, apply the suggestion/perception/subjective memory rationale to every idea you have or hear for the next 7 days. If you still have your sanity, you will believe in your own perception above all things. Only to escape the fieldtrip into schizophrenia, but hey, at least you are now self-confident.
My mother is the unluckiest person I know. She electrocuted herself last year when she was painting the house. Her metal ladder touched a power line. A couple months after that, she hit a Saint Bernard while driving her motorcycle. She was in the hospital for a week after that one. The previous year, she caught her house on fire while cooking french fries. She ran out of the house, tripped on the garden hose, and broke a finger. Not to mention the time she glued her hand to the mailbox with superglue. She was out there for an hour until my stepfather came home. The first thing he did was run to get a camera.
Yeah, I believe in bad luck. I inherited it from her.
The unluckiest person I ever knew was my friend Kathie. She was attacked by a guy on a date and left to die in the park behind the high school, but she survived with only one complication: he’d beaten her so badly that the skin under her eyes split open and since she was lying unconscious with her face in the grass she got a terrible infection and had to have skin grafts. Then she found her baby shoes and a book of her baby pictures in the house of the guy whose kids she babysat; turned out the guy married to her mom was not her real dad. (The kids she was sitting were her half-brother and half-sister.) Also her name was not the name she was given when she was born because her ‘dad’ was running from the FBI when she was a baby and the whole family changed their names to avoid detection. He was eventually caught however and spent several years in prison. Then her family built a nice new house (they had lived in a trailer until then) and had moved almost all their stuff in by Christmas Eve when a bad outlet caused the place to burn to the ground with all their possessions. On Christmas Eve. They had to live at the Holiday Inn for several weeks before they found a new trailer- apparently there was some mix-up with the insurance. There were other unlucky and bizarre things about that girl, too, but I can’t remember them all. She was a really sweet person.
I had a few unlucky years 25-35 years ago. Some major accidents, a lot of hospital time, recognition by the guys at the paint & body shop and the ER nurses as their only regular, etc. - actually had an ambulance driver tell me, “I remember you!” Anyway, I was going to make some pithy comment such as ‘and then I started paying attention.’
While there’s some truth in the aborted comment, I am actually trying to think back a quarter of a century; I did, in 1975, decide to address my series of misfortunes. Developing a faculty for paying attention was part of it, but unfortunate circumstances do sometimes aggregate and give one a day of woe. Repetitive days of woe might indicate something along the lines of one being ‘accident prone’ and demand an examination of one’s behavioral patterns. Or they may just possibly be the confluence of manny chaotic series of events.
Nevertheless, what I’m trying to communicate is that I WAS very much accident prone in my youth and I recognized that in my early 20’s and devoted some thought to changing that situation and I did. Paying attention in the local temporal sense is a big part of escaping the world of body shops, but I think paying attention on a grander scale is part of it as well.
While I’ve had differences with manny contributors to this site on cosmological viewpoints, I really do think that getting yourself sorted out on what you think makes a big difference in how successfully you carry yourself through this mortal coil. A large part of the population, I think, in this current day, never addresses just what they think about the underlying cosmology.
What else can I say - a map and rear-view mirrors will work for today.
There seem to be two types of experiences presented in this thread as “luck” those which can reasonably attributed to the actions of the individual and those which cannot. An example of that which can be attributed to the individual’s behavior is someone who trips over his own feet walking down the street. Although this may seem unlucky for the individual, and he probably didn’t intend to do this, had he used more care in his stepping, he could have avoided this. The other type of luck described is illustrated by occurrances which do not stem from the behavior of the individual, such as randomly finding money on the street. Where the individual neither caused nor could forsee the events which would lead him to that fortune. People who regularly experience the former type of luck, or lack thereof, may be able to attribute this to their own behavior. Perhaps they are easily distracted, and the limited amount of attention they pay to the things which they do may account for the misfortune that follows as a result. The other type of luck, is more difficult to explain. As a child, I assumed the universe effected some type of “luck conservation” that everyone posessed the same amount of luck, and while someone may be more fortunate than another in some respect, the latter experienced equally greater fortune in some other respect. Although its an interesting concept, it seems improbable, but should I discount the idea of some type of observable luck?
Sorry you had the bad luck to post this in the wrong forum, but this most definitely belongs in MPSIMS. There are no factual matters to be discussed regarding luck or the lack thereof.