Pirates, Monopoly, Janis Joplin

Luck finds man in prison cell

I believe in luck: How else can you explain the success of those you dislike? — Jean Cocteau

Let’s have a frank talk about luck. First, can we agree to dispense with the notion that it somehow doesn’t really exist? That what’s important is hard work, preparation, fate, genes, faith, good deeds, good thoughts, good habits … well, you get the picture. Those are all important, but I’m talking about good old-fashioned, no other way to explain it, luck. My years of playing Monopoly and Risk as a young boy against my brother plainly taught me these facts of life, but if you insist on more substantive proof, I give you Mr. Louis Galdy.

Galdy was born 1659 in France, but as a young man moved to seek his fortune at Port Royal in Jamaica, which was known as the ‘Wickedest City in the World,” due to its reputation as a pirate headquarters. Pirates there preyed on Spanish shipping with the sometime-acquiescence of the local British authorities. The community was built on a sandbar that projected out into the large natural harbor, and by the end of the 17th century, had 6,500 people living there.

Galdy tried his hand at piracy and found himself in prison at Port Royal in 1692.

Then, on June 7 that year, a powerful earthquake sent most of the town plunging into the Caribbean. For three minutes, tremors pulsed across the sandbar resulting in a geological phenomenon known as “liquefaction,” which means, instead of shaking, the ground literally envelops what is on the surface.

Galdy, trapped in his jail cell, found himself buried alive as his entire building sank quickly into the watery sand. Just as he was losing consciousness, a second tremor released a giant geyser of water from beneath his cell hurling him miraculously unharmed several hundred yards away in the open sea. As Galdy came to his senses out in the open water, a tsunami activated by the earthquake picked him up and carried him toward the swirling shoreline of destroyed buildings and sinking ships. A lone ship that managed to remain upright crested the wave, and as Galdy sped past, the crew

managed to pluck him out of the water. More than 2,000 people died that day, but Galdy lived until the ripe old age of 80.

Like I said: L-U-C-K-Y. The philosopher Daniel Dennett however has a different perspective. He writes: “Every living thing is, from the cosmic perspective, incredibly lucky simply to be alive. Most — 90 percent and more — of all the organisms that have ever lived have died without viable offspring. But not a single one of your ancestors — going back to the dawn of life on Earth — suffered that normal misfortune. You spring from an unbroken line of winners. Isn’t it true that, whatever isn’t determined by our genes, must be determined by our environment? What else is there? There’s Nature, and there’s Nurture. Is there also some further contributor to what we are? There’s Chance. Luck. This extra ingredient is important, but doesn’t have to come from the quantum bowels of our atoms or from some distant star. It is all around us in the causeless coin-flipping of our noisy world, automatically filling in the gaps of specification left unfixed by our genes and unfixed by salient causes in our environment.”

Another philosopher of a musical bent, Janis Joplin, put it best in what turned out to be her final interview before her untimely death at age 27: ‘“You are what you settle for. You are ONLY as much as you settle for.”

Lucky people take advantage of chance occurrences that happen to them, she was saying. They pay attention to what’s happening around them, listen and learn from their environment, and therefore, can extract greater value from each situation that happens to them. You make your own luck. You live a life of presence instead of focusing on productivity.

What did our friend Louis Galdy learn from his experience? He gave up piracy, stayed in Port Royal to help the town recover, served on the governing council and personally helped rebuild the destroyed church which he could glimpse from his prison window. He died beloved by his community.

As I said before, sounds like a lucky man to me.