Those who are happy in love, work or life are often said to be lucky. This expression can lead to despair, because it cancels talent, work, risk, takes away merit from those who dared and went to conquer reality.
What is reality? This is what they did and what they achieved, what they challenged and for what they took risks, and not the notorious luck, which is nothing more than a subjective interpretation of the surrounding reality.
They weren’t «lucky». They didn’t «try their luck» — nothing of the sort. They were not challenging luck, but themselves. They challenged their talent at the hour when it was time to take risks, the day they stopped repeating what they already knew how to do. On that day, they knew the joy of not repeating themselves: they were challenging a life whose essence, according to the French philosopher Henri Bergson, is creativity, and not divine intervention or chance, called luck.
Of course, talking about yourself as a lucky person can be useful. And from the point of view of self-esteem, looking at yourself as a lucky person is rather good. But beware of the wheel of Fortune turning. There is a great risk that the day this happens, we will begin to blame her for her fickleness.
If we are afraid of life, then in our experience there will always be something to justify our inaction
We cannot challenge “luck,” but it is up to us to create the conditions in which opportunities emerge. For starters: leave the cozy space of the familiar. Then — stop obeying false truths, no matter where they come from. If you want to act, there will always be many people around you who will assure you that this is impossible. Their imagination will be as generous in giving reasons why you shouldn’t do anything as it is when they need to do something themselves.
And finally, open your eyes. To notice the appearance of what the ancient Greeks called Kairos — an auspicious occasion, a convenient moment.
The god Kairos was bald, but still possessed a thin ponytail. It is difficult to catch such a hand — the hand slides over the skull. Difficult, but not completely impossible: you need to aim well so as not to miss the small tail. This is how our eyes become trained, says Aristotle. A trained eye is the result of experience. But experience can both liberate and enslave. It all depends on how we treat what we know and what we have.
We can, says Nietzsche, turn to knowledge with the heart of an artist or with a trembling soul. If we are afraid of life, then in our experience there will always be something to justify inaction. But if we are guided by the creative instinct, if we treat our wealth as artists, then we will find in it a thousand reasons to dare to jump into the unknown.
And when this unknown becomes familiar, when we feel at home in this new world, others will say about us that we are lucky. They will think that luck fell on us from the sky, and she forgot them. And they continue to do nothing.