So this psychiatrist at the University of Hertfordshire decides he wants to study the phenomenon we call ‘luck’. He lines up two groups of volunteers; the first group consists of people who feel they were just ‘born lucky’. The other group leans to the philosophy that they’d been short-changed by The Fates and that Life is Unfair.
The shrink gives both groups copies of the same newspaper and asks them to count the photographs. He discovers that the people who consider themselves unlucky take an average of two minutes to count the photos; the ‘lucky’ ones are finished in mere seconds.
Why the spread? The ‘lucky’ folks spotted a notice on the second page that read: “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this paper.” The unlucky group were too busy concentrating on counting to spot the notice.
The shrink’s conclusion: “Unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to a party intent on finding the perfect partner, and so miss an opportunity to make good friends … Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.”
A roundabout route to the oft-cited observation that we frequently make our own luck.
Frequently, but not always.
Consider the case of William Johnson — Blind Willie, to his friends. He was blind because his mother threw lye in his face when he was seven. He grew up impoverished, illiterate and the wrong colour during the Jim Crow years in his home state of Texas. As a young man he was arrested for ‘inciting a riot’. He was only singing a gospel song entitled If I Had my Way I’d Tear the Building Down, but he sang it a tad too fervently for the cops’ taste.
Blind Willie died in 1945 at the age of 48, of hypothermia from sleeping in a sodden bed in the ruins of his house which had burned down two weeks previous.
Not a lot of luck there.
Or consider the life of Eugene Shoemaker who dreamed of becoming an astronaut and was on his way to achieving it when a routine medical exam revealed he had Addison’s disease.
Goodbye astronaut career.
But Shoemaker made his own luck.
He took up the study of meteor impact craters on earth and on other planets. He got pretty good at it too — 32 comets winging through the heavens now bear his name. One of them, Shoemaker-Levy 9, crashed into Jupiter in 1994. It was the first collision of two solar system bodies ever observed by human beings.
It was also an eerie harbinger of the fate that awaited Shoemaker. Three years later the car he was travelling in crashed and he was killed.
Here comes the lucky part.
His colleagues chose to honour him by placing his ashes aboard a satellite being launched to orbit the moon. It was done, and when the satellite had completed its mission and the battery was about to die, the craft was deliberately crashed into the moon’s surface.
That’s where Shoemaker’s ashes will remain for all time, in a titanium capsule inscribed with words from Shakespeare:
And, when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night,
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
Blind Willie Jefferson didn’t end his life on this planet either. His voice is travelling in deep space aboard Voyager 1. It’s recorded on a gold-plated audio-visual disc that includes the sound of whales, a baby crying, ocean surf — and Blind Willie singing Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground. It’s in a time capsule gift from Earth.
The experts don’t know how many millennia Willie’s song will soar through space, but the ship is bound for the outer limits of our solar system.
Eugene Shoemaker’s ashes in an urn on the moon; Blind Willie Johnson’s gravelly bass singing the blues for eternity across the cosmos…
You and I should get so lucky.
