Project Happily Ever After

Some might say that I’ve been lucky in life. I could give you all sorts of examples. For instance, there was the time, years ago, when my girlfriends took me to Atlantic City for my bachelorette party. They gave me $200 to gamble. I walked to a roulette wheel and put all of it down on one number.

Before the casino employee spun the wheel, I knew I would win. I just had a feeling. Everything felt right about that number.

And the ball did, indeed, stop on the number I’d picked.

I haven’t gambled since, because I haven’t again had that “I’m definitely going to win” premonition.

But I’ve been lucky in other ways. I’ve had plenty of instances when the right person came into my life at the precise right moment. There was that college professor, for instance, who happened to be good friends with the editor in chief at a newspaper in Pueblo, Colorado, which happens to be where my paternal grandparents live. I happened to mention to this professor that I had applied for any number of internships without success. He happened to feel sorry for me because, at the beginning of the semester, I’d missed a few days of class due to the death of my maternal grandmother. I’d been despondent and depressed most of the semester as I’d grieved her loss.

He’d been the rare sort of man who would notice this type of thing in a student.

He said, “I’ll call my friend Barclay if you’d like. Are you willing to do an internship in Pueblo Colorado?” He had no idea that my grandparents lived there, and I had no idea how badly I needed to spend a summer with them. During that summer, I healed.

Not everyone has the right person walk into their lives at the right moment, though. Some people seem to suffer one hardship after another, without any reprieve. This has often made me wonder, “Why are some people lucky and some are not?”

Is there a Way to Game the Good Luck System?

There are plenty of books that will tell you how to get what you want. According to some, you just need to wish for good things and they will come to you. If you want to be rich, for instance, you should cut out pictures of other rich people and stare at them every day. Eventually, you’ll become rich.

If this doesn’t make sense to you, all I can say is this: it doesn’t make sense to me, either. This is why I have yet to create a vision board.

Christians believe in praying for good things, and there is actually good evidence that prayer works, at least to some degree. If you are interested in learning how to pray for good health, check out Larry Dossey’s Prayer is Good Medicine.

Lately, I’ve been studying Buddhism, which has its own system of good luck. It’s called The Law of Karma. I’ve written about my experiences with the excruciating joys of meditation in the past. Despite how much I struggle with it and Buddhism in general, I continue to persevere because, like sex and exercise, the act of meditation is, at times, a long hard slog, but I usually feel fantastic for a while once it’s over.

Which is why, last night, I attended yet another lecture by the same Buddhist nun, who, three weeks ago, had me sitting for so long that I developed an overuse injury in my rear end. Seriously. This is no exaggeration.

Last night, my favorite nun was instructing us about the benefits of unconditional love, which, in Buddhist tradition, is defined as loving all people—even the despicable annoying ones—without expecting anything from them in return. Even if they spit in your face and kick you while you are down, you are to find something lovable about them, because all humans are equally lovable.

As you might guess, this is one of those concepts that I struggle with. Somehow, I am still lucky, which may very well disprove the Law of Karma.

Anyway, my nun tells me that every time I fill the world with my unconditional love, I put karma dollars in my good luck piggy bank. Indeed, this nun says that lucky people have earned their luck by continually performing constant acts of selfless love, either in this lifetime or in the past. Unlucky people have not been so loving, apparently.

On one level, this makes sense to me. I’m a firm believer that we tend to get back what we give. If you want more love in your life, you need to love others more. If you want others around you to be more generous, you need to be generous first. If you wish the people around you would stop being so negative, you need to serve as a positive beacon.

That said, I do know a few poor souls who are exceedingly good people and who happen to also be incredibly unlucky. For instance, any number of Tibetan monks who have been beaten to death by the Chinese army come to mind. It’s hard to believe they did anything to deserve that, you know? Were they serial killers in their past lives? That’s tough to believe, too. And even if they killed a mosquito or two (being mean to all life forms is bad for your Karma, which is why most Buddhists are vegetarians), I’ve done the same thing on an exponential scale, and the Chinese army isn’t after me. Not yet anyway.

Which is why I don’t completely buy the whole karma thing. What I believe about luck is somewhat Buddhist, somewhat Christian, and somewhat entirely my own. It is as follows:

• Happiness cannot be found in fame, fortune, personal beauty or a perfectly manicured lawn. The most tortured people I’ve ever met have had all four. They were lucky, perhaps, by society’s standards, but not by spiritual standards. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be lucky spiritually than materially.

• You can’t micromanage the universe. The universe offers us gifts all the time. Sometimes we don’t notice because they are not the gifts we expect. Once we learn to notice the gifts we have rather than the gifts we want, we will feel lucky.

• Loving others—even the despicable people—is a good thing to do, even though it’s really hard to pull off. Even if it doesn’t make you lucky, it will probably make you happy. At the very least, it will give you something to do in your free time.

• Luck is in the mind of the beholder. Some people interpret good luck for bad and bad luck for good. You can turn bad luck into good, as long as you are willing to learn from it so you can grow stronger and happier as a result. For instance, I was stuck in a bad marriage for a few years, but I don’t consider this bad luck. My bad marriage made me a better writer and a better person. It was good luck disguised as bad. It gave me something to write about, and writing makes me happy.

What are your thoughts about luck? Leave a comment.

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Tags: good luck, Happiness advice

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 at 10:43 am and is filed under Happiness advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.