Recipe For Good Luck
Yeah, I know the word “luck” is totally plebeian, tarnished with the soil of ignorance and superstition. We may resist using the term preferring instead gussied up circumlocutions such as “in sync with the universe.” Is there any difference? Does not luck in all of it’s variations touch the finite nature of our knowledge, the radical limitation of control that we have upon our life? In a more primitive time, not so long ago, most of us were directly exposed to nature. Luck was a greater part of day to day life. As a kid I remember my grandparents praying for rain, as the corn crop wilted day by day from drought. I understand that the Romans had an altar to a feminine goddess Fortuna. She was represented veiled and blind, the daughter of Jupiter.
I propose these words from Lao Tsu as a formula, an approach to cultivating good luck.
The world is a spiritual vessel,
which can’t be controlled.
Manipulators mess things up.
Gamblers lose it. Therefore:
Sometimes you lead
Sometimes you follow
Sometimes you are stifled
Sometimes you breathe easily
Sometimes you are strong
Sometimes you are weak
Sometimes you destroy
Sometimes you are destroyed
Hence the sage shuns excess
Shuns grandiosity
Shuns arrogance.
—Tao Te Ching #29
And to argue that good or bad luck is not idiosyncratic, a surd-like happening, I offer the iconic Joe Btfsplk.
Joe Btfsplk was a character in the satirical comic strip Li’l Abner by cartoonist Al Capp (1909–1979). He is well-meaning, but is the world’s worst jinx, bringing disastrous misfortune to everyone around him. A small, dark rain cloud perpetually hovers over his head to symbolize his bad luck. Hapless Btfsplk and his ever-present cloud became one of the most iconic images in Li’l Abner —Wikipedia
