The god who runs all lives

There is a god. He oversees our adult life and directs everything we do, and his name – a mouthful, I’ll admit, but when you’re god, who cares – is Workloveluck. And my evidence for saying so is the life of David. Though your life or mine would do as well.

David’s Canadian. Last week he came across something I’d written and emailed me to ask if I was the same Joe Bennett as had failed to teach him French in British Columbia in the early 1980s. I said how nice it was to hear from him after all these years, and he replied what happy times they’d been, but ah well, life goes on, and so goodbye.

‘‘Whoa ho,’’ I said, ‘‘just hold it there. I think you owe me something before you go.’’ ‘‘What’s that?’’ he said.

‘‘Your life,’’ I said. ‘‘I want to know what you’ve been up to these almost 40 years.’’

‘‘My life’s been very ordinary,’’ he said. ‘‘You wouldn’t want to know.’’

They all say that. Because we’re so familiar with our lives we each of us imagine they are dull. We’re wrong. Every life, when viewed through others’ eyes, is quite extraordinary, all of which I said to him, more or less, in an email.

‘‘So come on,’’ I said, ‘‘spill those most revelatory of vegetables, the beans.’’

And he did, in a brace of chunky emails. And it was as I read them, that I saw god. A god who carries a trident on the prongs of which we are all of us skewered and writhing.

When David was at university his father, to whom he was close, died suddenly of an aneurysm. David grew depressed, dropped out, drifted, then crashed a car and underwent months of rehab. When finally he was well again he took himself abroad to work but came back six months later because he missed his dog. He took a lowly job in a warehouse to tide him over, and there he met a Japanese girl and fell in love. But though she seemed to love him back she soon returned to her mother in Japan.

He pined, found a job as a driving instructor – oh the odd ways of god – had another car crash, took it as a sign and flew to Tokyo unannounced to seek his love. She was delighted; her mother appalled.

David found work as an English-speaking proof-reader for electronic user manuals, but when the manual for the Fujitsu 12V laser printer arrived in North America containing the sentence ‘‘Take the not black wire beside the yellow wire and insert into hole for power’’, which David had let pass because it made him laugh, his job was over and with it his time in Japan. Eventually Miss Japan joined him in Canada, and they married and had a son. But mother came too.

There’s 30 more years of this to go but already you can hardly miss the troika of forces that run David’s life, the winds that blow his boat about. And the first of these is work. The need to work impels him into places where things happen.

The second force is love. Love for father, dog and Miss Japan, drove David up and down the scale of happiness and halfway round the world and back.

And then there’s luck, sheer blind and cussed luck, both good and bad, the arbitrary holy ghost of life. From aneurysms to car crashes and meeting Miss Japan.

Our god is Workloveluck. He runs all lives. To those who disbelieve I say look at your own.