joe_haldeman (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} joe_haldeman) wrote,@ 2009-06-17 12:19:00 |
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luck
Thinking about doing a poem about the varieties of luck. Because I consider myself a very lucky person, and wonder what that actually means.
"You make your own luck" is the American simplification, and of course it has a kernel of truth. We know people who continually sabotage themselves, and seem able to screw up any opportunity. And there are those (I think like me) who have a generally positive attitude and are willing to take a swing at anything that comes our way, and not be too disappointed if it doesn't turn out.
So that's a situational kind of "luck," one's response to opportunity. But there's also a kind of baseline, call it accidents of birth, which would be the universe of potential opportunity that you start out with -- genetics, the social situation of your parents, the political restrictions of your place of birth . . . a kind of matrix of opportunity, good or ill, that the individual may react to or against; use or squander or ignore, but does comprise an initial set of "luck" conditions.
And then there is the blind bullet. The life-changing catastrophe that you had no control over.
(There's an unstoppable misapprehension that the Chinese character for "crisis" contains the character for "opportunity." It's evidently not true, but it has foma power -- it so should be true that it sort of is.)
It's not the same as a Panglossian feeling that everything will come out right in the end. What's demonstrably true is that some people are floored by catastrophe, and others accept their changed circumstances and go wherever looks best.
I suspect I wouldn't have become a novelist if not for that close brush with death in Vietnam. A writer, yes, but only as a sideline while I pursued science or mathematics. In the long run, that blind bullet was the luckiest thing that ever happened to me.
Anyhow, it all belongs in a poem. I'll print it out and put it in the idea box.
Joe
P.S. Cloudy skies at night for weeks on end, it seems like, but it clears up before dawn. I've been hauling the questar out to look at the moon just before sunup, and the past two days made drawings of the same crater as the sun falls lower. Maybe I can do it for the next two days, before we leave for Alaska.)
Thinking about doing a poem about the varieties of luck. Because I consider myself a very lucky person, and wonder what that actually means.
"You make your own luck" is the American simplification, and of course it has a kernel of truth. We know people who continually sabotage themselves, and seem able to screw up any opportunity. And there are those (I think like me) who have a generally positive attitude and are willing to take a swing at anything that comes our way, and not be too disappointed if it doesn't turn out.
So that's a situational kind of "luck," one's response to opportunity. But there's also a kind of baseline, call it accidents of birth, which would be the universe of potential opportunity that you start out with -- genetics, the social situation of your parents, the political restrictions of your place of birth . . . a kind of matrix of opportunity, good or ill, that the individual may react to or against; use or squander or ignore, but does comprise an initial set of "luck" conditions.
And then there is the blind bullet. The life-changing catastrophe that you had no control over.
(There's an unstoppable misapprehension that the Chinese character for "crisis" contains the character for "opportunity." It's evidently not true, but it has foma power -- it so should be true that it sort of is.)
It's not the same as a Panglossian feeling that everything will come out right in the end. What's demonstrably true is that some people are floored by catastrophe, and others accept their changed circumstances and go wherever looks best.
I suspect I wouldn't have become a novelist if not for that close brush with death in Vietnam. A writer, yes, but only as a sideline while I pursued science or mathematics. In the long run, that blind bullet was the luckiest thing that ever happened to me.
Anyhow, it all belongs in a poem. I'll print it out and put it in the idea box.
Joe
P.S. Cloudy skies at night for weeks on end, it seems like, but it clears up before dawn. I've been hauling the questar out to look at the moon just before sunup, and the past two days made drawings of the same crater as the sun falls lower. Maybe I can do it for the next two days, before we leave for Alaska.)
