Apparently random luck rules our lives to an extent that I think is hard to overemphasize. Back two weeks ago I wrote about a tree that came down across my driveway. After I finished cutting the top of the tree away, I took a big wrecking bar and rolled it to the side of the driveway. For the last two weeks I’ve been planning to cut it up into smaller sections and put it aside. But there it still is three quarters to the side of the lower driveway and one quarter on. It looks awful and speaks volumes about my lack of organization and discipline.
But the funniest thing happened yesterday. A guy was driving on the road by my house when something strange happened. The shoe he was wearing on the foot that he used for working the brake and gas got tangled up with the gas pedal and he couldn’t get it free. Somehow, he must have panicked and lost control of the steering while attempting to free his foot from the gas and he ended up turning onto my property close to where the driveway was. He crashed through some small pines without even slowing down but the trunk of the downed tree was perfectly positioned to stop his car dead. He wasn’t badly hurt and his car only sustained some damage where it hit the tree so it was able to back out of the debris once he got over the shock. Looking at the line he was making through my yard the next stop was the bottom floor of my house. That would have been bad. That would have been a mess for both of us.
So, this is apropos of nothing. It’s just kind of crazy how two random acts of fate can interact with each other to some almost purposeful end. If that tree hadn’t fallen, he would have hit it square on and his car would have been totaled. If I had cut it up as I had planned in a timely manner he would have landed in my house and we both would be having a very bad month.
It’s funny. Even when I have bad luck it seems to turn into good luck for me. For a long time, I’ve had this theory. I feel like I’ve been borrowing good luck from an account and one day it’s all going to come due and I’m going to have a phenomenally bad day. But maybe I’m wrong. The exact mechanism of luck is not apparent to me. And I think there are different kinds of luck. For instance, I never win at games of chance. I’ve never made a fortune investing in stocks. All my luck runs to bad things not happening to me. And almost all of my luck involves escaping the consequences of my own poor judgement; sometimes by mere fractions of a second or sixteenths of an inch. And it’s been going on since I was a child. And over the course of a lifetime, I’ve become convinced that there really is something called luck. And some people actually have it significantly in their lives.
Anyway, it’s just something that seems to happen to me from time to time. Maybe I really do have a guardian angel. I guess it would be the height of ingratitude to ask him to let me hit the mega-millions just once. Probably not smart.
It’s interesting when something happens, and you think, “If I had left 5 minutes later”, or “If I hadn’t tossed X-item into the car.” I had one of those in 2018 when I was trying to get a hotel reservation for a hurricane evacuation. We needed a pet-friendly room, and just as I was about to hit the “Confirm key” >BLIP< -room gone! So I scrambled and found an alternate 30 miles further on. While there, we rescued a little tortie cat who had apparently been dumped at the motel. We added her to our clowder and named her Florence,… Read more »
Chance, fate, destiny; whatever you call it. It seems to me that it has a powerful force over our us.
Everything under the Sun happens for a reason for those whom God loves.
They say God works in mysterious ways. I agree with that statement.