Running on Empty...But Not Out of Luck

Friends:
Running on Empty…..
But Not Out of Luck


“Well I’m standing by the river, but the water just won’t flow,
It boils with every poison you can think of…. Leonard Cohen


It was bound to happen someday…my luck would run out and the creative juices would stop flowing, poisoned by “too many details, too little time.”

The Cardiologist’s office is a good place to think about Luck, and other things, like Prayer. So I did. What’s Luck anyway, but the happening of chance in time and place. Good luck for one may be bad luck for another. Imagine the exponential possibilities of events that luck has an opportunity to “play” with ~ staggering. Imagine a gigantic grid, lines crossing, and people moving in all directions. .. no finite gray matter can fathom it!

Theories abound about Luck. One, the “rationalist approach,” considers the rules of probability... and an avoidance of unscientific beliefs. It’s sorta like this: “A” happens, and then “B” happens…Therefore, “A” caused “B.” Get it?

Another theory is that of “chance happenings,” you know, those things like accidents, circumstances and ignorance. Bottom line: nobody has a corner on the definition market, yet

Mark Twain had his ideas on luck. He once said: “If you are looking for luck to help you to win an argument with women, there were just two theories that apply…and neither works.”

While waiting for the doctor’s dissertation on my 118/78 blood pressure and 62 pulse (either my luck held or my prayers worked), I envisioned what I’d like to call my “Luckometer.” It works like this:

Take a blank sheet of paper and draw two lines on it..one vertical, the other horizontal, crossing at the top. On the right side at the top write the word LUCK, and on the left side write the word UNLUCKY. So there you have it, the two extremes, separated by one hell of a thin line in the middle between lucky and unlucky... You with me?

Now, take any heading you want, and write it at the top of the page…things like, Love, Health, Finances, Friends, Job, you name it…won’t matter. Then list on the Lucky or Unlucky side of the page the abundance of things, good or bad, that fall into the respective category. It’s easy to see if you have been, on balance, lucky or unlucky, by the preponderance of entries you’ve made on one side or the other. Eye-opener!

I celebrated my good luck after the cardiologist’s visit with a tasty lunch of sausages and fried chicken livers, and other good S. GA vittles with my pals Frank and Alan. We talked about luck, and Frank allowed as how it was hard for him to decide if he’d been lucky or unlucky…which side did the 7 hernia operations fall on and the 6 divorces? My indigestion began at that point, and I added a few more points on my “lucky” side of the ledger.

Luck would have it that my outrageous friend, Dan Nicholson, called…full of one-liners, he reminded me about luck: “Bud, there are three kinds of folks….People who Make luck, those who Let luck happen, and those who Wonder what happened.”He said to me, “Pal, which of these are you?”

Let me pass this question on to you: Which are you?


Bud
September 11, 2008