Moon Echoes

Happy Birthday!

I’ve been thinking about luck a lot recently. The place I’ve moved to feels imbued with ridiculous amounts of good luck - even just in the first 2 weeks, all sorts of improbable things have happened.
Last time I was here for six months, I got hit by a car. I sitting writing in the backseat of a parked car at the side of the road, when a truck driver coming back from a night shift fell asleep at the wheel and drove into me at speed. That felt like bad luck.

But then I used the insurance money for our immigration application, something we wouldn’t have felt we could afford otherwise. So now we find ourselves back here in this place we love, and we’d still be in London unless I’d been hit by the car.

Also, the car I was in was a stick shift - unusual out here - in neutral with the parking brake off… which allowed it to roll and dissipate the impact, meaning that my injuries were limited to bad whiplash. So that was good luck in the middle of bad luck.

So luck is a way of looking at randomness with optimism or pessimism, I guess. One of Amy’s bedtime books has an old Japanese proverb about a farmer who suffers alternate good and bad things… his neighbours keep saying “What Good Luck” and “What Bad Luck” and each time he says, “We’ll see.” and each time, the good thing leads to a bad thing and vice versa.

So maybe your spilled diet coke will lead to something good!