“Do you think of yourself as lucky?”
This was the question my husband Frank asked me as we walked to the restaurant on our first date 25 years ago. Yes, then and now: I think of myself as an extraordinarily lucky person.
After reading The Witch Elm, a deliciously fascinating mystery by Tana French, I’m asking myself another question: What is luck?
Luck is just one of a handful of intriguing themes that are woven through French’s novel but luck is where the story begins and ends.
Toby, the late-twenties, handsome, charming, well-educated, well-off main character says on page 1:
“I’ve always considered myself to be, basically, a lucky person. I don’t mean I’m one of those people who pick multi-million-euro lotto numbers on a whim, or show up seconds too late for flights that go on to crash with no survivors, I just mean that I managed to go through life without any of the standard misfortunes you hear about. … Not that I spent much time thinking about this, but when it occurred to me, it was with a satisfying sense that everything was going exactly as it should.”
As I followed Toby through the undulations of the story, I keep asking myself what is luck, really, and what do we do with it?
Hard work = Luck?
“But we’re so desperate, aren’t we, to believe that bad luck only happens to people who deserve it. People genuinely can’t take it in that someone could die of cancer without bloody well smoking.”
― Tana French, The Witch Elm
Living in Boston in the 1980s, I was a big fan of the Celtics and of one of the stars, Kevin McHale. After a bananas, last-second, game-winning lucky shot dropped for him, he said, “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”
At the time, I 100% bought it: work hard, do everything right, and you’ll get the bonus sprinkles on your cupcake. Now I think this is only partly true. Hard work and practice gets the ball regularly near the hoop; luck drops the ball in when you need it to go.
And hard work isn’t the only variable for life to go well. Plenty of hard-working folks don’t get what they work for. We live in a random and haphazard universe that is full of systemic biases. Believing that everybody gets what they deserve is a defense against the fear of that random haphazardness and the reality of those biases.
How often has an unforeseen good thing happened to me that I wanted very much to attribute directly to something I did to deserve it? The personal growth work. The extra hours. The sweat.
How often have I heard of someone’s horrible misfortune – an ugly divorce, a terrible diagnosis – and I looked to find how their choices, their behaviors led them to it? They didn’t pay attention to their relationship. They ate Oreos for breakfast. They never got off the couch.
That’s fear talking. That’s fear scrambling around looking for evidence about how this will not happen to me. When the truth is, who knows? Good stuff happens. Bad stuff happens. It just does. Sorry, Kevin, your hard work got you to that game; it was luck that won it.
Privilege =Luck?
“Now I think I was wrong. I think my luck was built into me, the keystone that cohered my bones, the golden thread that stitched together the secret tapestries of my DNA; I think it was the gem glittering at the fount of me, coloring everything I did and every word I said.” ―Tana French, The Witch Elm
In The Witch Elm, Toby has all the privileges. He’s white, straight, male, educated and comes from a helpful, wealthy family. The thing is, Toby doesn’t see how these privileges make his life easier. He’s oblivious to how his circumstances are completely different from those of someone without his advantages.
Characters without his wealth, education, or family connections make what seem to Toby incomprehensibly bad choices, when their circumstances offer them far fewer options. Even members of his own family who lack even one of his benefits – his female cousin, his gay one – are saddled with far less easy lives.
So maybe luck isn’t luck at all but rather the result of a long string of causes and conditions going back to the beginning of the beginning that land each of us with our personal collection of advantages and disadvantages.
Luck is, perhaps, just shorthand for what destiny gave you. As Toby says, luck is literally in his DNA: he was born into it.
Lucky = Grateful?
Since reading The Witch Elm, I’ve been talking to my people about luck. What do you think luck is? How do you feel about luck? A couple nuggets have emerged.
First, you can be lucky and still have bad stuff happen to you. People who see themselves as lucky have also been dealt real difficulty: mental illness, freak accidents and life-changing loss.
Second, life circumstance doesn’t necessarily impact your sense of luckiness. Folks without employment, with severe disability and uncertain future prospects all said they feel lucky.
I asked Frank why he’d asked me the “lucky” question on our date all those years ago. He said he thinks your sense of luck says a lot about how you see the world. You can have all the advantages, like Toby did, and not fully take in the gift of them. If you don’t recognize, appreciate and show gratitude for the good stuff, Frank says, that’s a red flag.
I am truly a lucky duck. I am fully aware that much of my luck has nothing to do with anything I have or have not done. It is the result of a long line of causes and conditions that landed me in luck’s lap and for that I am truly grateful.
So perhaps the real question isn’t “what is luck?” but rather “how can I recognize, appreciate and show gratitude for my luck … and how can I spread my luck around?”
