How a Belief in Luck Helped Me Find Myself

I am fascinated by the role of pure, blind luck in our lives. Luck affects benign, tiny circumstances like catching a red versus a green light or beating the long line that forms 30 seconds after you get to the register. It plays in meeting the right person who changes your life, or perhaps the wrong one who instigates a decade of pain. It even determines, in the most fundamental sense, to whom and what circumstances we are born and the literal lifetime of consequence arising from that. Who would you be if you were born to different parents? This is an examination of some of the profound roles that luck has played in my own life, and some of the ways in which I try to accommodate its influence.

I grew up going to a summer camp which, among other things, had a simple climbing wall. My love of that activity each summer led me to take on more serious climbing adventures. I went on several long climbing trips as a teen, the most intense being a three week backpacking trip to the Wind River Range in Wyoming (that is a full adventure on its own, which I will share another time). Later, when I was a freshly graduated Lieutenant living single with ample time, money and a body in its physical prime, relaxing with my friends at an old Victorian style church converted into a climbing gym became the highlight of my week. We went at least once, sometimes twice a week, on whatever random day suited my group of friends between bar hops, board game nights, and mildly inebriated games of ultimate Frisbee. I had a very close knit, loving and overall brilliant group of friends, and I regard those years as some of the best of my life.

It was a random Saturday morning when we walked into our climbing gym, and there at the base of the wall, preparing to climb was a startlingly pretty blonde. I smiled at her as we passed, she smiled distractedly back as she focused on her eight-knot, and I sometime later offered her the lamest of pickup lines: "Can I hold your rope?" She accepted, and for the next three hours we ignored the friends we had each arrived with, and talked while we traded belays. She was in town that day on a whim, living 3 hours away and typically climbing the real cliffs found in southeast Ohio. But, her friends had heard of this gym and wanted to check it out, so there they were. After three hours talking and enjoying the chemistry arising from a shared physical sport, when it was time to leave, we awkwardly went our separate ways, her giving me a disappointed look as my group walked away. No number? Nope. Because I had recently come to the conclusion that I was done with love for a while, and, to be fair, I was a total coward about women by then anyways.

My friends mocked me unrelentingly. How could I mess that up? How could I mess that up with that girl? What a miss. Myself abashed and my friends deeply amused, we moved on. Three weeks later, I ditched my friends on a Saturday morning as they went to the gym so I could go to work instead. The reader can see I have always been full of clever decisions. I was working on a paper for an upcoming conference when I got a text from my friend Mark: "I got her number."

"What?"

"She was there again. I got her number. For you. Here it is. You owe me."

Consider: my group's timing to the gym was erratic and unpredictable, and that she drove three hours the first time on a day and time we happened to be there, producing our meeting at all was a pure fortunate coincidence that was further dependent on whatever circumstances led her to have friends wanting to make that drive in the first place. Add to that my having a friend present the next time, without me, who was 1. loyal enough to try to make up for my idiocy, 2. charming enough to pull it off and 3. also loyal enough not keep it for himself. Combine these circumstances with her having friends willing and having time then to drive three hours again on the off-chance that she [not] see me (she insists to this day that was not the purpose the second time), and the odds become insurmountable. I did not view things this way at the time, but I did agree with my friends - I was wildly lucky. We got married two years later, and while we have had our ups and downs, I consider that to be the luckiest day of my life.

Not all luck in my life has been beautiful, though. Sometimes, for reasons either entirely out of our hands, or by virtue of an unpredictable confluence of events which would not individually prove fatal, luck can be devastating. Eight years earlier, my day had began exactly the same as any other. I awoke in my college dorm room, headed down to the cafeteria for breakfast, and prepared for the day of classes. I had my routine down to the minute, stepping out the door within probably 30 seconds on any given day to arrive to class ten minutes before it began. Today, though, my roommate, who had awoken earlier for a World of Warcraft campaign than for any of the classes he routinely skipped, caught my attention on the way out and I stopped to talk to him for a few minutes. Apparently they had a powerful mage friend in an Asian timezone who was going to help them that day - sort of cool in a way, since the internet was young then. That few minute delay would change my life.

It is probably banal that the change turned out to be a girl, and the girl turned out to be disastrously bad for me. What is intriguing here, for me, is the blindingly unlikely circumstances that led to that disaster, and the far reaching consequences of that day.

I lived on the 8th floor, and so took an elevator down most days. The distractingly pretty girl I found waiting in it that day, who we will here call Lindsey, typically left at the last possible minute to get to her morning class and so was, I would learn, generally a few minutes behind my closely timed routine. I got in, we smiled at each other, said something pleasant and forgettable, and I went on at my usual fast pace well ahead of her to class. Throughout that day, I saw her another 5 times, having never noticed her before that day. She was noticeable, and particularly at that age I tended to notice the noticeable noticeably. I would even go so far as to say that I had never in my life seen her before, and that day we just kept running into each other.

How, after a semester and a half of eating in the same cafeteria at least once a day, both taking one of two possible elevators repeatedly each day, and going up and down the same quarter mile road at least twice a day we had avoided encountering each other only to find one another five times in a single day felt beyond unlikely. It felt like fate. Finally, after exchanging amazed smiles crossing a street past each other, I called out to her and said that, if I was going to keep seeing her, I had to know her name. And so I kept seeing her.

It turns out Lindsey was on the back end of a bad breakup that was not exactly a breakup in the classical sense, was possibly not entirely stable even before that. Myself being 1. a college aged boy confronted with a beautiful and interested girl, 2. a bit insecure and 3. a gambler who didn't mind some adventure, I was perfectly happy for her attention anyways. How bad could it really be?

Though it only lasted a few months, by the end I lost my virginity to her, my GPA, my scholarship, at least one friend, my capacity to bond with my hard-earned fraternity brothers, and after a few bouts of her unapologetic infidelity, my trust in love. There is plenty to be said of my own culpability in allowing these things to pass. My choices were my own. When she left me, though, my finances, relationships and self-esteem were affected in a way that left me vulnerable to the even worse relationship that followed.

Having spurned my fraternity brothers the previous semester, I threw a small, sad party with a different set of friends to celebrate return from summer. In a somewhat defensive mindset and eager to improve it, I caught the attention of a shy, attractive girl I had never seen who walked in. A year previously, I would have respected the warning signs that emerged as we grew closer, but after an emotionally turbulent summer, I was ready for a distraction. I genuinely do not believe that my emotional state would have led me to endure the next five years of gas-lighting, manipulation, infidelity and deliberate cruelty that followed if not for that elevator ride with Lindsey. Without that long moment of intimate proximity, usually uncomfortable but so natural in that instant, we might have passed one another that day, likely noticing, but I would not have called out. She would have just been another of a multitude of pretty girls passing on the street that day.

It would take a decade and a half and some existential challenges in marriage before I confronted and overcame the damage that was done by the relationship I allowed myself to be primed for by Lindsey. To be sure, my own poor decisions, immaturity, insecurity and hormone driven mindset played central roles in that misadventure. I am not without blame for how it turned out. But there are only so many bone-deep sociopaths in the world, and the circumstances that flung me into the path of that one began in an elevator ride tracing back to my roommate's gaming clan needing to accommodate some guy's timezone in Asia for a raid. Strange luck.

Catch the right green light by half a second, and you avoid the drunk driver a quarter mile behind who plows into the car that stops there instead of you. A friend of mine's life was saved when his parachute failed to deploy correctly on a routine (for him) skydiving jump, and when he crashed into the ground at 60 miles per hour, a trauma nurse happened to be driving by and gave him life-saving stabilization right after he impacted. What if she had caught the red light instead of the green two minutes earlier? Or the green instead of the red, and drove past before she could see him plummeting? A freak bureaucratic error resulted in my not moving to Australia for three years despite some serious plans on the part of the Air Force. The resulting sequence of assignments culminated in my getting a full scholarship to Oxford for a PhD I never knew I wanted, which has fundamentally changed the course of my life. I explain in my Recapturing Mystery post how catching pneumonia might have been one of the most beneficial events of my life. The tiniest circumstances, the most subtle and unremarkable of changes in our lives, can prove life altering.

So what should we do? The cynical might ask, if it is all luck then what is the point of working hard? Another might reply that we make our own luck by our choices. Some would see the work of Providence, and say that the illusion of luck is just ignorance of God's will.

Regarding the third, I do believe in God, and I do pray. That said, I will also say that while I am enormously grateful for the blessed life I have been gifted now, as far as I can tell the will of the divine appears to amount to luck where humanity is concerned. I certainly did not earn at birth this magical life any more than the children dying in armed conflicts across the globe earned their often short, brutal existences. I can see nothing but poor luck in their terrible circumstances, and enormous, undeserved luck in my not being born into such a fate.

Neither do I think that the fatalistic approach is appropriate. While I believe most of our luck emerges from circumstances entirely out of our control or even influence, we can place ourselves in a position to take advantage of good luck when it comes. We can likewise situate ourselves by our own choices to be devastated by a passing bit of bad luck. All the good luck in the world cannot help us if we cannot take advantage of it when it is offered. If I find a brick of gold while lost and dying of thirst in a desert, I am not better for the gold. Conversely, if we have prepared ourselves against the black swan, when misfortune descends from clear skies then we might suffer only a little - indeed Nicholas Taleb has a powerful book regarding how one might even profit by what most suffer as poor luck.

Rewind to the fateful bureaucratic debacle that cancelled my three years in Australia. I was, at the time, completing my Master's in Aeronautical Engineering in Ohio. While attending a welcome brief to my university, I sat next to a an enthusiastically sociable woman who turned out to be the former commander of the unit I was assigned to go to after completing my degree. Excited that I was going to her former unit, we struck up a conversation and we remained in touch for the duration of my degree while she pursued her PhD. A few years ago, I had sent my resume to the US Air Force Academy to express interest in teaching there, with the full expectation that my information would live for eternity lost in a file cabinet. It turns out that Angie went on to command the Department of Aeronautics at the US Air Force Academy, and a year after my Australia trip fell through, Angie was looking for an Aero engineer, saw my name, and gave me a call. I am 100% confident that I would not have received a call if I had not unwittingly sat next to Angie that day in the auditorium. When I performed well under her, she supported my application for my Oxford scholarship, and the most influential and the three best years of my life so far followed.

There is much obvious luck in that story. Meeting Angie. Australia falling through. Many other unique circumstances I will not share here, as well. But there are elements of skill, without which none of it could have happened. For starters, I enabled the luck by the simple action of submitting a resume against all reasonable hope. I performed highly in the meantime, and my boss had a glowing recommendation when Angie called him for reference. I was highly involved in education and STEM outreach, and so had developed a degree of credibility in education. By virtue of my efforts, I was in a position to capitalize on multiple strokes of blind luck when they came. Without my preparations, meeting Angie would not have helped me. On the other hand, without meeting Angie and without Australia falling through, I would never have been assigned to teach at the Academy, and thus never went to Oxford, which I consider to be the most powerful experience of my life. Neither luck nor preparedness are sufficient on their own. We need both.

My hope is that the reader takes from this a regard for the role of luck in their own life and the lives of those around them. So much of what shapes our lives, the benefits we reap and the misfortunes we endure originate in happenstances over which we personally have no influence. From this knowledge I derive a great degree of humility in my own achievements; I could as easily be in prison, on the street, or carrying a rifle in the desert (I considered trying to become a Ranger in my more athletic days) if things had turned out differently at just the wrong moments. Because I appreciate the role of luck, I can without absconding responsibility for my shortcomings and failures, also forgive myself when life goes awry - sometimes there is genuinely nothing we could have reasonably done differently.

I also try to employ a greater degree of empathy than I am naturally inclined towards by my capitalist heritage. While people certainly can create or annihilate some of their own luck by their preparedness, there are limitless possibilities for people to be thoroughly destroyed by circumstances which they could not possibly avoid. We are all prisoners, and adoring benefactors, of lady luck. I think that acknowledging her role in our lives is one of the most important steps to internal growth that we can take, lest we spend a lifetime attributing greatness and disgrace to works that were never entirely our own.