Rule #6: Embrace your luck

It's wise to accept what we can not control

Many of the important things about my life were decided without me. The same is true for you. Somehow as adults we spend significant time pretending this isn’t the case. We desperately believe we are masters of our fates and that we all can be heroes, overcoming the odds. Rule #6, embrace your luck, says the opposite. It’s an admission of the undeniable fact that much of what determines the quality of our lives is not in our control. At least not in the way we pretend it is.

To make my point, here is a list of important facts about our lives that we did not control. None of us chose:

1. To be born at all

2. What year our lives begin

3. Where in the world we live (at first)

4. Who our parents were and what they were like

5. Our genetic gifts and liabilities

Those 5 factors determine more of the trajectory of our lives than anything else that will ever happen to us. Imagine a young Leonardo da Vinci living in the darkness of a 14th century salt mine in Poland, or a teenage Lady GaGa raised in a 200 BCE nomadic community of Egyptian camel traders. The results would not be the same. I don’t think of this as limiting or depressing. It’s just a fact.

A related and more pertinent truth is a giant 30km wide asteroid could be flying through space right now that will end all of humanity, but no one will know about it until it’s all over. Just one day, POOF. Lights out for all of us. If it happens in this next moment, thanks for allowing this essay to be the last thing you will ever read. I am honored. But maybe grab a beer just in case.

Bad extinction jokes aside, this is all OK. We are lucky to be here right now, however things are. We’re fortunate there is a star like the sun that just happens to be stable enough, as gigantic nuclear reactions go, that one planet out of eight could, after 3 billion years, create and sustain life. In an infinite universe this is possibly the greatest lottery victory of all time. All this means we don’t have to dwell on the limits of our awareness, or obsessively fear them, since they inspire both fear and wonder. My message instead is that to stay in denial of our limits works against wisdom.

Instead we should embrace as much of what has happened so far to us as good fortune. The Stoics have a phrase, amor fati, which means love of fate. We can try to work from whatever situation life puts us in. Why? Because we can’t control what happens, but we can try to choose how we respond to it. Complaints, no matter how valid, change nothing. The past is the past. We can feel sadness and grief for it, two powerful, unavoidable and potentially beautiful parts of the human experience, but no amount of looking back can give us control over what is ahead. So when we are ready let us be brave and get on with it.

In this sense, we’ve been lucky to have any time alive at all (See #1 above). And to have the ability to remember our past, and perhaps a friend to explore it with, is a victory. We have a story behind us and we can now write the next chapter. We get another roll of the dice when many do not. As Shakespeare wrote in The Tempest, “what's past is prologue.” But prelude to what? We did not choose those five factors, but whatever freedom we have right now we can choose to use to the fullest. To do things anyway and embrace that life has risks. We do not have control, but so what? Having control was never a possibility. Not for the birds, bees, the dinosaurs or any living thing today or a million years from now (assuming that asteroid never arrives).

When I have a bad day, or a great one, I try to remember that list. I try to remind myself that while I do make decisions and take actions, there are vast waves of forces that will impact me that I can do nothing about. And that this is OK. I deserve credit for my initiative, but only up to a point. We are like small sailboats on a giant ocean, and even if we do everything right there are massive waves and terrible storms with their own agendas out there. There is a Yiddish proverb that says “We plan, God laughs.” But the opposite is sometimes true too: we sail in the wrong direction, or pack the wrong gear, and serendipitously it all works out somehow due to forces beyond our control. Luck works both ways.

One of my favorite books is The Great Big Book of Horrible Things. It’s a darkly comic compendium of all of the worst things people have done to each other. And boy is there a lot to cover. Studying the worst of 10,000 years of human civilization makes me feel lucky. It reminds me of how fortunate I am. The people who endured endless wars, plagues, inquisitions, natural disasters did not choose when and where to be born any more than I did. So far in my life I have not had to live through anything like the stories found in that book. Most of you probably have not either. History can be liberating: it reframes the present with a wider and wiser lens.

Embrace your luck is a reminder to be kind to ourselves when we make mistakes. And be humble when we have successes. Some of the blame or credit is no doubt our own, but much of the story is that in this universe we are largely along for the ride.