I’ve been thinking a lot about luck lately. Probably I’ve always thought about it more than most people do. But the news of your son’s Thanksgiving birth, Hoke—the profound feeling I got in my guts when I read about you pressing his little body to your bare chest in those first minutes of his life—all of that has once again stirred up my fixation with it. With luck, I mean.
Are you guys familiar with the Fallout video games? Post-apocalyptic, open-world, first-person-shooter kind-of thing? Anyway, at the beginning of those games, you get to customize your character, and not just obvious stuff like race, birthdate, and sex, but more determinative details like talents, temperament, and trade. Among the many foundational decisions is the opportunity to highlight two or three core attributes from the following list: strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility, and luck (the acronym, of course, is S.P.E.C.I.A.L). Now over the course of the many years I spent playing these Fallout games—each time with a unique character build (cyborg-monk-prostitute or zombie-poet-gunslinger or whatever)—I never once chose luck as a defining characteristic. Never even wore a piece of armor to improve it or spent an experience point to bolster it. “Luck,” I can hear myself scoffing. “Pshaw.”
But, like, where does this come from? Was I taught as a child to distrust it? How young was I when I learned the line from Seneca? “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” Was it one of my own coaches or another on TV bellowing, “We make our own luck here!”? I think too of all the articles out there about luck, how some authors treat it like a force of nature, something wild to be tamed or honed, like horses or the wind. Others talk about luck as if it’s perishable, like they can preserve it along with the last of the summer stone fruit. Some representative titles: “Ten Proven Ways to Create Your Own Luck” from Entrepreneur Monthly and “Serendipity Strategies and How to Support Them” from The Journal for Information Science and Technology; the oft-cited Luck Is No Accident from the famed Stanford psychologist.
I understand, of course, the human desire to quantify the inexplicable, to make sense of the mysterious, but I find the logic behind all these platitudes and publications painfully simplistic: “be an opportunity magnet,” “loosen up,” “be outgoing,” “be flexible,” and “don’t be afraid to fail!”
What a bunch of garbage. Like, really, the apex of privileged-hindsight-bullshit. Anyway, what the hell would Seneca—a Roman freaking aristocrat—know about luck? “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity,” he writes. “When!” His very definition of luck presupposes something lucky already happening! This is the folly in taking advice from men like Seneca; there’s no shortage of opportunities for them.
You know, thinking back on my Fallout experiences now, I realize I was wise to eschew luck in just this manner. I knew, after all, that the game-world would revolve around my main character. The above adages, thus, were useful in these unrealistic and virtual Petri dishes. The games would script all the good fortune—all the opportunities—I could ever desire. Did I really need a 10 percent better chance of uncovering more valuable loot, of my blaster finding my enemy’s mutated heart? I was to be savior of worlds, curer of diseases, vanquisher of devils. “I make my own luck!” such a hero could convincingly shout. “Show yourself, opportunity, so that I might unsheathe my mighty preparation!”
Needless to say, this is not the kind of luck I’ve found so captivating lately, so staggering. What I have in mind, I suppose, is more along the lines of what Hamlet bemoans as “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” what the Chinese have for centuries tried to charm and corral with feng shui. I speak of that—good or bad—over which we have no control, of luck like entropy, like a roll of the dice.
Take, for starters, our very existence. Each of us—the unique Hoke, Murph, and Wuck—beat unfathomable odds to take his first breath. Something like four-hundred-million-to-one were the odds that the sperm carrying our specific blend of traits and predilections would win the race to the egg. Imagine the other possible Hokes with full heads of hair, the other Wucks without peanut allergies—hundreds of millions of them! And yet, here we are, all three of us having cashed in numbers less likely to hit than the ones on a Mega Millions ticket. To whom do we owe that luck? It certainly was not of our own making, nothing resembling the intersection of preparation and opportunity—just random chance, good and staggering fortune.
I think also of those poor bastards shipped off to either side of the Western Front, how they poured up and over their respective berms of dirt into a widening gyre of bullets or found their expanse of trench obliterated by some mortar-fire lobbed over on little more than a whim. What determined which twenty-thousand men died in No Man’s Land, which forty thousand found themselves forever mangled, and which forty thousand lived on to see the second day of the Battle of the Somme? The men who returned from that awful madness—especially those who survived all four years—did so only because they were luckier than those who didn’t. “All a matter of luck and happenstance,” writes Tim O’Brien about who lives and who dies in war.
I mean, we don’t try to put ourselves in situations where all we have is luck—a longshot roll of the dice or flip of a card—but we do find ourselves in them.
When, for instance, my aging mother tripped and fell in front of my in-laws house the same night your newborn son entered the world, Hoke, nothing but sheer luck kept her from getting seriously injured: breaking a hip or a wrist, a prolonged hospital stay, pneumonia, something worse. Nothing but luck. Random, unmerited, good luck.
Years ago, Hoke, you ran into Magic Johnson in an airport, somewhere in Michigan I want to say. I think I’d mentioned to you at some point in the distant past that the only celebrities I could imagine feeling starstruck by were Paul McCartney, Hulk Hogan, and Magic Johnson. These three felt like the unapproachable deities of my childhood, figures larger than life, more incredible to me than the Queen of England or Jesus Christ. Whether you remembered that or not, you knew I’d cherish some personalized memento and approached him on my behalf. “My buddy’s a huge fan,” you told me you said. “Do you think I can get an autograph for him?” To this day it hangs in my childhood bedroom, a slip of white paper encased in a mylar comic book bag wedged into the corner of a framed Lakers jersey: “To Murph. Good Luck. Magic.” I still look at it and marvel sometimes: “For a brief second, Magic freaking Johnson contemplated my existence!” At the time I didn’t think much beyond that, didn’t really consider the sentiment. But over the years I’ve returned to it again and again, wondered how many such phrases he might have used through the decades of his stardom, how and when he settled on “good luck.”
Despite the obvious and not insignificant hurdle of being born a Black man in America, Earvin Johnson needed a lot less luck than most. If you’re looking for a real-life human being to play the role of hero in a sandbox RPG like Fallout, it’s Magic. His gifts are countless and astonishing, exactly the kind of dude to get away with saying something like “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” And yet, in a scribbled missive to an adoring stranger—in tens of thousands of such missives—his default valediction betrays an acceptance of how impotent we all actually are, how utterly powerless in the face of an ever-changing world and infinite universe.
So: your son, Hoke. Frankly, I believe he will be “special,” and not just in the eyes of his dad and his dad’s buddies but—like his dad and his dad’s buddies—in the eyes of many. Hell, he may very well be brilliant. But let’s face it: being brilliant isn’t always enough—sometimes not nearly. For every extraordinary professional out there—for every beloved artist—there’s another who never caught a break, who didn’t nurture their tremendous gifts as a result, and who drifted toward something, say, far less fulfilling. Maybe even soul-crushing.
What all this amounts to, baby Hoke—apple of our collective eye—is that I wish I had more for you. I mean, there are already gifts in the mail. And as soon as this pandemic subsides, I’m on a plane to meet you, I guarantee it. You’ll also never have to wonder where to turn for twenty more bucks at the arcade.
Beyond all that, though, what certain thing can I offer? What can any of us? Not much, I’m afraid. You’re at the mercy of universe, bud. As are we all.
Good luck.
<pull-quote>I figured<pull-quote>
<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>There's small drama in this. Just like Jane Austen's or Dostoevksy's characters get a letter delivered at the front door and it sits on the drawing room table for a week, pulsing with interpersonal drama.<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>This is how I pray every night, actually, whispered but aloud<pull-quote>
<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>Serious? What does it sound like? I've twice tried to put words to my private blessings, at Wuck's kind insistence.<p-comment>
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<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>ha! good eye, hoke!<p-comment>
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<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>"Hey, God. It is I, Ryan Francis, 1868 North First Avenue, Upland, California, 91784, United States of America, North America, Northwest Hemisphere, Earth, the Sun, the Milky Way Galaxy, the Universe..."<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>So grateful.<p-comment>
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<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>I was worried you'd think I was kidding. I'm also glad just this much satisfied you!<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>Oh, please: do continue. Such exquisitely different theology instilled in Little Murph: Hey Santa! I know you're a busy guy, but if you have a moment, here's little ol' me down here...<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>talents, temperament, and trade<pull-quote>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>you make any of them contentious actors, skilled at the piano?<p-comment>
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<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>You can be a bard in The Elder Scrolls games?<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>Progress is slow.<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>This is the folly in taking advice from privileged men like Seneca; there is no shortage of opportunities for them<pull-quote>
<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>"Privilege-hindsight-bullshit" is a wonderful way to name and dismiss what's at work in an industry of books and seminars.<p-comment>
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<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>hegel: the owl of minerva flies at dusk.<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>the female Murphs with brown eyes and self-destructive streaks<pull-quote>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>to think—we might have fucked.<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>Hoke With Hair totally woulda beaten Blind Faith Wuck to first score with this Hot And Wild Female Murph.<p-comment>
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<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>but i loved her, hoke.<p-comment>
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<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>lol<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>nothing resembling the intersection of preparation and opportunity<pull-quote>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>tell that to a sperm. what letters one might write!<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>but we find ourselves in them, nonetheless<pull-quote>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>last week i received a very complimentary email from a casting director after a commercial audition. this never happens. success!<p-comment>
<p-comment>callbacks were today; i wasn’t invited.<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>her parents’ notoriously frigid dining room<pull-quote>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>we’re headed to sarah’s mom’s place in virginia in a couple of days so ben can meet his grandma. sarah is planning to use the baby as an excuse to insist her mother turn up the thermostat.<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>not wanting to crumple newly ironed fabric beneath a seatbelt before making my evening’s first impression<pull-quote>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>how do these politicians do it?<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>I learned this from you early on, Murph: unbuttoning my lower shirt buttons when driving, only to fully assemble upon arrival. Struck me as tactically brilliant in high school.<p-comment>
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<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>ok, now hold on. undoing the bottom button allowed murph a lack of bunching that has nothing to do seat belts specifically, but rather sitting in general.<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>“Grandma?!” went Grammar. “Grandma?!”<pull-quote>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>oh, man. bless him.<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>cracked her head open<pull-quote>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>so... no owl?<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>Even after season one, we don't know, bud.<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>“Help me up,” she snapped. We’d gotten lucky.<pull-quote>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>oh, boy. i can hear her now.<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>“To Murph. Good Luck. Magic.”<pull-quote>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>slam dunk!<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>I was leaving my grandmother's funeral in Lansing. A small hopper flight to O'Hare. I sat in the aisle, maybe 8 rows back, and who could miss Magic's size when he ducked into our tiny cabin at the last minute before taxiing? I'd slept at your house, our junior high overnights, and his huge yellow "32" jersey framed on your bedroom wall beside the bed was on my mind. Sometimes you gotta step up and connect the dots. Be ready for when preparation can meet opportunity. Loosen up, be outgoing. Don't be afraid to fail. Unfasten your seatbelt and go talk to Magic when he boards your short flight. Ask for a friend.<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>how and when he settled on “good luck.”<pull-quote>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>once he found it, that must have been it. although, maybe not to, like, dying kids.<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>valediction<pull-quote>
<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>Never seen this word. Thanks.<p-comment>
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<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>Hey. Happy Advent.<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>an acceptance of how impotent we all actually are, how utterly powerless in the face of an ever-changing world and infinite universe<pull-quote>
<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>I think of this as the heart of true spirituality. Maybe most of our addictions and bad religions are attempts to avoid or deny this. Why do people have sudden "death bed" breakthroughs and revelations? Ancient biblical imagery about days of judgment may have been about throwing communities into this consciousness for a few moments. As both monks and Tyler Durden of Fight Club remind us in ascetic terror: "You are not your car, you are not your career, you are going to die." Or, add from Saint Murph of Upland: "You are not the master of your destiny, fucker. Good luck."<p-comment>
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<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>impotence: the virility of the spirit, by chokel.<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>enough—sometimes not nearly<pull-quote>
<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>Enough for what? Success? Achieving one's dreams?<p-comment>
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<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>Success is easy peasy. Realizing one's first dreams? Hoo boy.<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>Evans Hall<pull-quote>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>oof.<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>Man, I'd forgotten the name of that towering math building that called to me on the worst mornings. <p-comment>
<p-comment>A turning point for me in my suicidal fever: reading Thomas Merton's essay, "Humility Against Despair." He didn't coddle me. It's here on my shelf: "a man who is truly humble cannot despair, because in the humble man there is no longer any such thing as self pity."<p-comment>
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<pull-quote><pull-quote>
<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment><p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment><p-comment>
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<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment><p-comment>
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<pull-quote><pull-quote>
<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment><p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment><p-comment>
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<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment><p-comment>
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<pull-quote>I sat before an empty comment bubble for twenty minutes late last Friday night<pull-quote>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>saturday night here, an hour or so after you posted. we just finished dinner. we’re out of newman cookies, so i stopped by the bodega on the corner for a pack of peanut m&ms. in the mini-coop now, a decaf in my yeti, and my santa hat on my noggin. first color—drum roll—is blue! go dodgers!<p-comment>
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