Have you ever felt lucky? Or grateful that something or someone ‘happened’. That it makes you so happy that you share that ‘one thing’ to your close friends and then it feels like you’ve shared it to everyone. Some may cheer with you and some may even take your pride as envious. There’s a recent phenomenon that I have picked up. When it comes to things that are beyond extraordinary or something that the ten percent of the bell curve could only achieve and then out of nowhere you began to share things alike, there’ll or some outskirts of commentators that left a mark that sounds like “oh you’re just lucky”. As if you just happened to be in the right place at the right time and it feels that had anyone been positioned into your place they would have managed to do the same thing.
Some trivia that you can tell your friends to make you sound smart, Instagram, after being created in just two years, the founders get a deal to sell their app to Facebook for, get this, two billion dollars. In an interview, the founders were asked how much of the whole journey from creation attributed to luck. In which they replied it is to be fifty percent luck.
Recently I have been feeling a creative burnout, when I say recently I meant around a year ago. I have always felt that I have always been lucky. People could cheer on how astounding or how escalated some achievements are and I have always felt it was or at least a huge portion of it was attributed to luck. I just happen to be at the right time and in the right place. Maybe those expressions are some form of overleaking of gratefulness, it leaks so much now it began to completely conceal my self-esteem. I have never in the slightest, attributed myself, as a creator, for my talents to come from within, instead from externally. For so long I have believed, in order for one to succeed, it needs to be put in the right place and in the right time. My reactions to situations are just like any other people. I feel no indifference nor I feel special.
I need not be proud of what I do as much as I feel the neighbourhood kid next door could do the same thing, had he been given the same opportunity. Same family to be grown with, same food to eat, same financial support that I was given, and same love from the people around me. For so long I have convinced myself that I am not special, and if not entirely, replaceable. Just a mind, conscious mind that is fortunately able to be put in a rather rough situation and grow from it. I believe many critics would put their place in a rather similar place, where the people that they hate the most, are in where they are, because they are simply lucky. Same goes with my recurring sayings in previous articles that we are our own self worst critics.
Before we touch the topic of luckiness, I want to touch on the topic of unluckiness. Sometimes, whenever I am stuck in a cold rain, I feel extremely grateful to have some sort of shelter above my head. I hear the raindrops ferociously hit the ground in a much more rapid frequency than how it was ten minutes ago. I imagine fellow brethren and sisters who aren’t as fortunate as me as I believe there are and they certainly exist. There are also some times in a not so distant pass where arguably the most cruel living conditions for a human being existed, Auschwitz. Prisoners live without a sheer reassurance that they are really living. Their clothes are exactly the same to each other, their hairs were cut from every inch of their body, and they are addressed with numbers or even called animal names by their so-called guards. With their belongings being stripped away from them in their departure in the train stations, truly they have nothing but themselves in the camp. Now imagine, being unlucky it is to be them, surely to some extent you will have some part of gratitude to how nice it is to be able to eat other than a single piece of bread for every four days or even put bread in your pocket because of starvation by sunset. I’m not saying these to guilt you but rather to bring a perspective of unluckiness.
In the middle of the whole experience, you overhear the people around you, and even your friends, have finally talked about a subject that you fear the most, the possibility of you losing their lives. As you realise that you indeed have lost a lot of friends to death in this camp and why should the next one be any different? As much as it hurts your soul hearing their stories of hopelessness you couldn’t quite get the words out the words you’re trying to say on how their lives are worth more than they think they are. It hurts your soul to hear them saying that they no longer have anything that they look forward to in life and you feel like you’re trapped in a cage like a bird singing it’s time away with no one outside the cage knows what the bird is saying nor how it feels. An incredible distance grows from how it seems to be objectively, literally beside you. You finally stand up and say, “even if you no longer see what you hope from our life, there is still what life hopes from you.” “There is me, Dave, I still hope that you still live with me.” Just in a moment after the words got out from your mouth, the whole cell stared at you in astonishment, and some even teared up a bit. Dave began to realise that maybe, just maybe, the purpose of living lies not on what we expect from life, but what life expects from us, as a person, as an individual. That our life, your life, Dave’s life, is not to be taken for granted and there is a special role, a special role where Dave is completely irreplaceable, and not even Dave realises it, because we are often blinded in our own sheets of self doubts, ego, and self-worthlessness. For so long Dave has been living in a world created and manifested by him, a world where life could give Dave what he wants, and where the bridge to his world and reality were shattered and there’s little hope to survive or even get out of the camp alive, so does Dave life. Dave’s life goes to the drain along with his world he dreamed of. Dave has forgotten about his wife and his daughter that are in foreign country, waiting for Dave’s return to his home and caressing their family, their children, in which only Dave’s role could fill. Dave and Dave alone. Dave has truly forgotten that life still has hope for Dave, a hope where Dave continues on living and gives something to life that no one other than Dave could give. You cherish the moment with Dave as you hear those words came out from Dave’s mouth, from someone who has not been cursing anything but suicidal words from his mouth for the past ten days. You teared up as you are happy to hear that you need not to lose another friend from suicide in the gruesome horror in the camps. You now realise that the famous saying from Nietzsche it’s true all along, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” For now you are happy that Dave can bear almost any how. Digging snow in midnight now seems more bearable, the frostbite on Dave’s foot doesn’t seem to recover and yet he stands roughly while doing work avoiding being spotted sick and being thrown in the gas. Dave’s eyes emanate a thousand volts of aliveness now, and so do you every time you hear Dave’s story about how much he loves his children and Dave’s fantasies returning to them, even just a glimmer of hope, his love to life, came back at him again. Just how your life was restored, the moment you remember that there is still so much that life hopes from you.
Earlier was an imagination of mine in a form of sequence of writing that represents how prisoners may share their care towards one another. It was a fictional work of mine that I truly loved and to some extent some of those words are relayed to me, in person, through verbal speech. The moments were inspired by Viktor E. Frankl’s book Man’s search for meaning. A truly wonderful and eye opening book, written in the most seemingly most ‘unlucky’ faith / place in human history.
Now we could move forward in touching the topic of luckiness. When a moment seems to be too absurd to comprehend or even properly grasp that something is ‘happening’, we or at least I, like to contribute it as ‘lucky’. Maybe it’s due to the lack of my self esteem, or maybe it’s due to the overbearing amount of self doubts that I have. To some extent, it’s good to have self doubt, it’s what stopped us becoming an egomaniac. In another part too much self doubt also deprecates us, not believing that we are capable of anything and makes us feel replaceable, like how Dave used to feel, completely replaceable. What is it with us that sometimes put the lens to believe that somehow the world are stacked against us, to imagine a world is a barren landscape with hostile living condition and we are barely going to make it and even in a short period of time, may not experience true happiness or experience the ‘thing’ we truly wanted, and when we (in the slightest) feel that we are experiencing something alike, we love to call it that we are lucky, and call other people who experienced it to be lucky. I see some people and hear some stories where there are some people who, in a sense, have reached their peak. In a such that moving forward from that ‘peculiar’ moment in time, they will return to the mean and become average for the rest of their lives. I believe that is to be a brutal badmouth, but that is what humans do. What is it with them that curses so much on other people outstanding performance, so outstanding that they choose to label it as luck. To incomprehensible to become an outlier. In some sense there is a possibility that I was just talking to myself, the badmouthing, with a shadow in my life that casts doubts on my path.
Okay anyway, I recently adopted a belief that everyone is ‘lucky’ or has experienced some amount of luck in their lives. What matters is what that individual does in response to that so-called ‘luck’. Some people could be born lucky in terms of financial support or even anything and still spend their lives doing nothing about it, luck after all is just a mere perspective. Luck is a mere perspective. You can inherit all the financial support that you wish in the world and live doing nothing about it, because without character, we are just another walking flesh pretending to be human. We fantasised on what we want in life and spent our whole life getting close to that goal without thinking of what life expected from us. Which many have been spent (before us) in that way. When we finally walk our last step and leave this world forever we would realise it was never about luck or the situation, it was about what we do in response to that situation and shape our character and believe that how we capitalise on what life gave us and make an effort to give something in return to a extra ordinarily beautiful short life. Even a human could create something meaningful in arguably the worst time in human history and so do we, with the right perspective, we will keep thriving and leave a mark of something meaningful in life, and that something meaningful is special as much as it is to me, to Dave, and for you. For you are entirely irreplaceable.