| the blog of human failure
Let me give you a hypothetical situation. Think of your favorite body part. Have you got it in your mind? Good, now let’s lay you went to the doctor for a routine checkup and the doctor started feeling around in that way that doctors do. After touching and squeezing your parts that have little value to you, first your middle toe on your left foot, then the red mole on your back, and then he settles on that good one. You know the one. He’s standing there really giving it a squeeze, making middle-range guttural noises like you imagine the obese make during intercourse, and then after a few seconds more of twisting and poking at it he furrows his brow in that way that he has seen doctors on TV furrow to indicate human sorrow.
“I’m sorry, but I feel a lump indicative of a malignant tumor. I’ll have to take a biopsy and run some tests.” You leave and come back four days later.
“Good news!” he says. “All tests came back negative. It’s a harmless growth that we can remove without scarring. You’re very lucky.”
So that’s my question. Are you lucky? In my opinion no. To me lucky isn’t the absence of bad things happening, but instead the occasion of an unexpected positive. It’s best coupled with no negative consequences for others.
For instance if you put on an old winter jacket and find a $20 bill in the pocket, that isn’t lucky. You didn’t gain anything; you just retrieved $20 you had previously lost. The wrong has been righted. If your friend lets you borrow a jacket and you find $20 in the pocket you’re moderately lucky. You’re probably a shitty friend if you don’t return the money, but your friend is none the wiser. That is unless he planted the $20 as some sort of friendship test, in which case you’re better off pocketing the money, keeping the jacket and never talking to that person again. Real friends don’t test you. If you go to an upscale restaurant and you forget to wear a required dinner jacket so they give you one to borrow and you find $20 in that pocket, then you are exactly lucky.
I know other people just think this is an issue of point of view. It’s a philosophy or a way of looking at the world. These people are so bereft of good luck or general happiness that they must skew all of life three places to left so that every bowel movement which requires only one wipe is a small miracle. A one-wiper is fortunate, it is pleasant, it is economic in regards to toilet paper and sewerage, but alas, it is not lucky. It’s just to be expected from a healthy colon.
Is every non-negative in life good luck, or is luck a word reserved for the truly positive?
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