As luck would have it
Won the lottery? Struck by lightning? Found something to watch on your streaming channel? Paige Nick ponders the meaning of luck
I’ve been thinking a lot about luck. It started out with how superbly unlucky the world has been this year. We thought we were so unlucky last year, with Brexit coming in and Trump not going out, the rand tanked more, and we lost some great celebrities, including famous meme Grumpy Cat. How naive, we had no clue what unlucky really meant.
One of my favourite comedians, Eddie Izzard, does this bit about anxiety. His theory is that if you’re feeling anxious you should laugh out loud because it’s impossible to go two ways at the same time. For example, you can’t simultaneously yawn and scream, or cough and smile.
But luck doesn’t work that way. I think one can feel unlucky and lucky at the same time.
Unlucky that the economy has shut down, your industry may have tanked, and people are desperate, starving and really, truly struggling. But at the same time, still so achingly lucky if you have a home, health, enough food for now, maybe a job (if you’re lucky), and a pair of scissors in a drawer for when your hair gets really out of control and tries to steal your credit card.
The ultimate truth of luck is that it’s relative.
Last Friday night I felt so flipping lucky to find something good to watch on Netflix. And even luckier that it was something my guy hadn’t already seen.
Around the same time, two other South Africans were also feeling pretty lucky. Allister Nunn and Allan Huysamen were finally on a flight home after spending two months stuck at their departure gate at
Kuala Lumpur International Airport.
In early March, they had just checked in and gone through security when their flight home was cancelled as both Malaysia and South Africa were heading into lockdown. They couldn’t fly home and they couldn’t leave the terminal. So unlucky!
But this is what luck does. It runs the gamut. Unlucky, lucky, unlucky again. Unlucky to get stuck for two months in a terminal, but lucky it wasn’t a bus terminal. Lucky to survive and finally come home, then unlucky again when they discovered they couldn’t even crack a bottle of anything to celebrate their homecoming.
In my day-job in advertising, there was a two-year stretch where I did copywriting work for a casino. Now they take luck seriously.
Rumour has it that the reason the carpets in casinos are so garishly patterned and brightly coloured is because a gambler in the midst of a lucky streak will go to great lengths not to change a single circumstance. They won’t leave the table or machine for anything. Not even the bathroom.
Some wear adult diapers so they can stay put even when they have to go. Taking wearing your lucky underpants to the extreme. Others don’t. Making carpets that don’t show stains a necessity. Unlucky if you’re the carpet cleaner.
Meanwhile, Frane Selak feels like the universe’s experiment in good and bad luck. A music teacher, born in Croatia, he was once on a train that flipped its tracks into a river, killing 17. He was also on a flight where he was blown out of a malfunctioning door, killing 19. Three years later he was on a bus that crashed, killing four. In 1970, his car caught fire and he escaped just before the fuel tank exploded. He was hit by a bus in 1995. And some years later, driving on a mountain pass, he swerved into a guardrail to narrowly miss a head-on collision with a truck. The rail gave way, the car door flew open and, because he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, he managed to hold onto a tree as he watched his car plummet into the gorge below.
Divorced four times, married five times. Was he unlucky to have found himself in such a ridiculous and unlikely number of dangerous situations, or lucky to have survived them? It feels like luck could never quite make up its mind with Selak. Until 2003 when he won $1.1-million in the lottery.
Luck can be fickle. Just look at lottery winners. Evelyn Bashore won a $3.9million Pick Six Jackpot in 1985, and another $1.4-million five months later. She moved into a trailer park, broke, by 2000.
There are Reddit threads overflowing with stories of lottery winners in prison, some dead by their own hands, others murdered, robbed, driven mad, divorced multiple times, addicted, estranged from friends and family, or worse. A large percentage completely broke, bitter and lonely, working in cookie factories, abattoirs or McDonald’s for the minimum wage. There’s even a story of an existing millionaire who won the lottery, only to then lose everything.
I wonder if any lottery winners were unlucky enough to get struck by lightning? Or would getting struck only once actually be lucky? After all, the odds of being struck by lightning twice are one in nine million, which is still a bigger chance than winning the Powerball.