I Know We Are, We Are The Lucky Ones

There will be no vblog today, perhaps there will be one tomorrow. In the meantime, I would like to talk about luck.

I don’t really believe in luck. I believe in chance, surely, and I do allow for the possibility that the great card-dealer in the sky has stacked the deck. But I can’t tell for sure. Point is, things happen, and sometimes it seems chaotic and incomprehensible, but most times if you look hard enough you can find the clues and the causes for just about everything that happens from hurricanes to flat tires (I had a flat this week, but I don’t chalk it up to luck; instead I chalk it up to faith in the tire-fixing powers of my local W**-Mart).

But all that aside, I have been feeling pretty lucky this week. I feel like pieces of my future are coming together. I’m finding patterns and meaning in my thesis; I’m making progress on packing up my shit-hole; and I’m finding good news and responses for my overseas job search. Yesterday, in fact, I met with a professor I had in class last semester to see if he would give me a reference (and inscribe my copy of his memoirs). He did both, and he and his assistant offered some very good advice and some encouragement. It struck me that were it not for the vagaries of university scheduling, I would never have taken his class (it was a last-minute decision to take his class over one in the Communications department) and would probably not have given as much thought to working overseas as I have. Is that luck, or is it chance? I would hope that even if I had not taken his class I would still have found a goal that is as intriguing and worthwhile, and have the wherewithal to pursue it effectively.

It’s kind of like Buffy The Vampire Slayer. There was that episode in season three, “The Wish,” which explored the idea that Buffy never came to Sunnydale and thus the whole town went to hell. It’s actually one of my favorites, simply because they manage to kill the ENTIRE main cast, except for Giles and Oz, in the course of the episode. But is it really the case, that if you take out one event from our temporal Jenga© towers of chance and happenstance the whole thing fall apart? Or does the universe simply take a detour to reach the its destination? All fun and chaos theory notwithstanding, it’s a pretty unanswerable question, and more than a little moot.

I think it is worth mentioning, however, that Giles managed to undo the wish and set reality straight. So, there you go.