I have never really believed in the idea of luck. At no point in my life have I ever felt that we all have little leprechauns on our backs rolling a die every time we make a decision, with some a little deeper into the Guinness than others. It’s always seemed to me that people who consider themselves lucky brush their bad experiences under the rug, while their counterparts always seem to get caught in the rain because they forget the 3 weeks in a row when there wasn’t any rain to get caught in.
A recent thought on the matter was that we simply need a coping mechanism to deal with the things that happen to us; sometimes an explanation, sometimes an excuse. I don’t know if it is tied to our endless obsession with avoiding blame, but the two concepts do sound a little familiar and they mingle rather well in my occasional ponder party.
Paddling swiftly back onto course – I realised a while ago that despite my misgivings about luck, there is one part of my life that can almost only be explained by blind luck. Throughout much of my life I have been called an introvert. It’s what I score on Myers-Briggs tests most of the time (for whatever that crap is worth, I’m usually an INTP or INFP). It’s how just about every teacher I’ve ever had has described me to my parents. It’s been repeated so much that the idea of being an introvert is permanently etched into the monolithic tablet of my psyche.
(I’d like to take a short aside for those readers who know me and are wondering how this loud, conversationally bullish guy could think himself introverted. Summing things up, I’m only really comfortable talking to a group of about 8 or fewer people and I’ve probably never initiated a conversation with a stranger in my life. It’s also why I’m pathologically early to everything, though I might explain that particular weirdness at a later date. It’s really impossible to not be good at talking when you grow up in a big family, but that doesn’t mean I’m comfortable doing it.)
And yet,
I have ever had an endless supply of friends.
You might be thinking to yourself, “Well, that’s not especially weird. Everyone has good friends.” To that I’d point out how I met most of my bestest friends foreverest.
The first friend I remember making was another quiet kid who, I think, went to my preschool. He and I became fast friends (I think, it was almost a lifetime ago) when his sister offered to teach me how to read. My parents paid her a pound a session to teach me phonetically and I met her brother at their house during our lessons. That’s a friend gained purely because someone else wanted to help me with something completely irrelevant to friendship. She didn’t want to be my friend, I was 3. I’m not sure I could really even hold a conversation yet, let alone do things that busy 10 year-olds choose to spend their time on.
My next best friend just happened to be born a few months after me, live on the same street – in a house I had technically lived in for the first week of my life – and socialise in the same circles. Admittedly, I’d known him since birth and our parents were friends. There’s even a picture somewhere of me holding his ears and sucking on his nose while we were both in high school nappies. Still, what are the chances of two couples who know each other and work together and are similar ages having a kid at the same time?
Okay that one’s a little flimsy. Moving right along.
Next, one of my oldest and greatest friends was from the first year of primary school. There were two boys who made me utterly miserable every time I bumped into them on the playground; my first ever bullies. This was before anyone knew quite how bad my eyesight was (that came after a combination of walking into things, getting hit in the face by flying objects a lot, and not paying attention to work on whiteboards I couldn’t actually see), so maybe I was physically bumping into them. I forget. Either way, I hated those two as much as a year 1 child can. However, for seemingly no reason, I started hanging out with one of them. Very quickly (within a few months), it became clear that this kid who had caused me such torment actually had a whole lot of things in common with me. He liked pokemon, I liked pokemon. He liked vegemite, I liked vegemite. The list would go on if I could be bothered to illustrate that point much further. Basically, we were great friends.
That friend, a guy who once made me loathe school (before I could even spell ‘loathe’), was one of my greatest friends for years, and saying goodbye to him to move to the other side of the world was probably one of the worst experiences I have had. Some people would note that I still keep in touch with friends from the old country, but this particular one is almost impossible to communicate with in any way other than finding and talking to him. It’s a trait I appreciated up until I realised that that would mean travelling over eleven thousand miles for a visit.
One of the handful of friends that I have kept up with on, quite literally, the other side of the planet is the son of one of my dad’s best friends. That doesn’t sound so strange until you hear that we lived a solid 6 hours apart (For England that might as well be on Jupiter, since most people don’t cross the Watford gap before going to uni, let alone visit the opposite end of the country on a regular basis). Despite the distance, that friend became as good as a cousin, and then a brother, over 20 years of sporadic visits. Had my parents not become good friends with his parents through another series of weird happenings and relationships, I’d be another friend down.
Next came another strange coincidence in high school (that’s just what I’ve always called secondary school, or years 7-13, because I’m one of those weird third culture kids and we have to resort to using “incorrect” terms sometimes). I remember well the meeting of a friend – who would be a nexus for future friendships – whilst sitting in an odd line, in uncomfortable (not to mention, unnecessarily expensive) sports shorts, during my first ever P.E. class at big people school. We talked confidently about rugby while waiting for I forget what, despite neither of us having played the game or really knowing anything about it (I knew how to give people a solid bosh, but that’s about it). We shared no other classes and were in rival houses (yeah, the hardcore, competitive, harry potter kind) and I’d probably not have heard his name for another couple of years had I not sat exactly where I had in that one P.E. class.
That friend just happened to be childhood friends with another of my longest lasting friends. We didn’t really meet for another year after the previous encounter, despite both of us buzzing around that one friend who seemed to be the hive for many random people. I have no idea when we started hanging out, or why. I just know that within a year and a bit, I’d made my new best friend and found the person I’d spend most of my free time with for the next 8 or 9 years. At the time, we had virtually nothing in common except that one guy.
Skip forwards a few years and things start getting a little more random.
There was a guy who happened to be the only other European in a room of ~600 people during a weird icebreaker in an accounting lecture. Then I happened to get offered a job with his childhood friend. At the same time I had a “group based learning” class (that’s best read as, ‘class no one learns much in’) where teams were formed based on a variety of random criteria (country of origin, first letter of surname, childhood pet etc.), and the friends met there were a huge part of what got me through my first and second years. A little later I met the boyfriend of a friend I’d met at a group two great friends – who just happened to make the same move I did shortly beforehand – were going to and suggested I join. I was one of that guy’s groomsmen. Skipping ahead a little further and you have a team I joined in another good, old-fashioned GBL class purely because we all chose to sit at a particular table. Who wants to learn another 4 names after you’ve spent all that grueling effort anyway?
What I’m hoping all this illustrates is that I think I’ve probably been lucky. Under my own steam, I’d never have met or cared about or spent hundreds of hours of awesome time with a such a long series of great people.
I don’t believe in fate (because I choose not to. Suck it, fate). I’m terrible at poker (though my total lack of a poker face is actually a boon, and I still have a trophy to prove it). I’ve never won the lottery. I’ve never once got the pokemon I wanted out of those stupid 1 pound gacha games they have at every single cinema and arcade ever. I’ve never kicked a basketball from the centre of the court and got it straight through the hoop without intending to (For that matter, it’s never worked in all the times I’ve tried to do it). By most standards, I have not experienced a great number of terribly rare or spectacular events.
And yet,
One of the most significant aspects of my life seems to have been brought about either by divine intervention (which I wouldn’t rule out) or sheer, bloody luck. So maybe luck is just an expression for having experienced things which would only be rare if there weren’t seven billion people on Earth, or maybe it’s a stat you’re born with and you have to drink special tonics to increase it before exams, or maybe it’s a good word for blessings caused by mundane relationships, or maybe it’s just how envious lazy people describe people who work really hard. I’m not sure what it is, or if it exists.
What I do know is simple; I still can’t rule anything out.
Halfwit Scholar 
