Is there such thing as good or bad luck?

Is there such thing as good or bad luck?

What is luck?!

Go easy on me, this is my 1st blog post, and I’ve been procrastinating about doing this for ages.. so this is my 1st shot! Ripping the bandaid off in 3, 2, 1….

If you are not familiar with stoic philosophy, or maybe haven’t sat there and really asked yourself the question, what is luck? Like is there some ultra cosmic god like being,  that is pulling all the strings and bestowing all these good and bad things on us? or is the universe really just a chaos of all cause and effect? One thing happens, causes another thing to happen, causes another chain of events to happen and so on? What if event are going to happen regardless, outside of your control, and the only thing you can control is how these events affect your internal self? If the above statement holds true, then increasing your luck and happiness is maybe just a matter of putting yourself out there more and doing different things which would inadvertently inject you into more chains of cause and effect which increases your chances of getting something that you want, and being mindful and aware of this concept.


I’m about to tell a little story here, so just follow me on this.. hopefully you get the point I’m going to make on this and my drunken rambling makes sense. There was once this farmer who had a son, one day the son was working in the field and broke his leg. The son was whaling for hours in the field until the neighbours found him. The neighbours helped the son to the house so the farmer could take him to the hospital, the neighbours said to the farmer “oh your son broke his leg while working in the field, that’s some bad luck!” The farmer replied “maybe bad luck, maybe good luck, who knows?”. The son was in the hospital when the army recruiters came to the farmers house, to conscript the son for the army as war had broken out. As the son had broken his leg, he was excluded from having to serve and did not have to go to war. When the neighbours stopped by and the farmer told them what happened, the neighbours said, “what good luck your son had! Because he broke his leg, he did not have to go to war and be put in danger!” The farmer responded “maybe good luck, maybe bad luck, who knows?.  Now I could keep this story going on forever, but the point I’m trying to make, is that maybe good or bad luck is based on purely on perspective.

To give you an example, I had an experience that kind of reinforce this for me yesterday. My wife had texted me letting me know that her Nonno had passed on, and I knew she would be extremely upset by this (As anyone would be). On my way home I stopped by the bottle shop and grabbed her a nice bottle of wine and a nice bottle of Jameson for me (hint, hint, its my fav whiskey!). I drive home and pull into the driveway, jump out of the car and walk around to the rear passenger side door, open it, Reach in for the box of alcohol, and as i pull it out, the bottle of Jameson slips out the bottom of the box and smashes on the driveway! (Picture included above) I was instantly gutted! A delicious, beautiful bottle of Jameson smashed all over the driveway… I tried not to get to upset, but i was really gutted. My wife heads out to the driveway and sees me in despair and said, don’t worry, i'll call the bottle shop and tell them what happened, they will replace it as their packaging was faulty!.. I was like oohhh okay if you could :(.. Anyways I started to drive to the bottle shop while my wife called them and she sent me a text with the details of who to speak to. When I arrived, I asked for said person and explained what happened. The manager said “sorry for the inconvenience, we will give you a 1L bottle instead of the 700ml for the difficulty”. Inside I was like “whooooot”.

Taking a short sided look at this and acting in the moment, smashing my whiskey seemed like such a fucked up thing to happen.. I was genuinely devastated as I allowed myself to get caught up in the moment. But in the grander scheme of things, the bad luck, actually worked out to be good luck!! Maybe good or bad luck, is purely based on perspective?

Shit happens! maybe next time, instead of losing your shit straight away, Chill! think maybe something good will come from this, and let it happen. Hopefully reading the above might make you think back of sometimes something similar happened to you!