Luck

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I was reading a story when I realized that luck is a big thing and it plays a huge role in our lives. Assuming luck is really just luck and not some deeply unconscious program our brains run hidden from our conscious thought and consciousness. 

When I consider “luck” I think that I achieve some goal that comes from what seems like chance. It seems to me to be a development that comes in the absence of any obvious design on my part or the part of influences and stimuli in my environment. 

Example: One day while on military leave from my Marine duties I was driving down a main road, Flomich Avenue in Holly Hill Florida, that was a through drive with many/frequent side roads controlled by stop signs. Suddenly I had this instinctual urge to slam on the brakes and within a moment or two after a pick up truck traveling fast flew through the stop sigh, rose off the road a foot or so and landed hard across my road of travel landing on the road opposite the one he ran the stop sign. If I had not stopped suddenly and seemingly by some chance or luck that truck would have hit my on the drivers side traveling at high speeds, over thirty-five or forty mph, and slammed directly into my car in all likelihood taking the top half of my body and car off leaving me and the car, dead, dead, dead. Was it luck? Was it chance?

This was not the first time nor was it the last when lady luck seemed to favor me toward the living rather than allowing me to enter the realm of the dead. Is it luck, coincidence, serendipity, fate or karma? 

Or is it about perceptions and experiences collected that trigger such seemingly mystic triggers that cause us to act when it seems there is not real plausible reason to act and in these cases saving my bacon? 

Maybe the training and practice I got as a Marine along with some other stuff actually programmed my vigilance triggers and caused me to possible detect, maybe I heard the engine off to my right and it sounded like it was not stopping to my unconscious, something that triggered my response and action to stop quickly, you think? 

I remember another day when I was assisting a driver of a huge and heavy 155 self-propelled howitzer to load up on a low-bow trailer to be hauled back to its barn. I was standing up on the area over the trailers fifth wheel, where the trailer attaches to the semi-truck, when the howitzer pulled up on the back trailer incline raising its two foot circumference barrel high overhead when the driver shoved the hatch up, raised his upper body and head out where I could clearly see him and then motioned me to move. I thought that I had safety and shook my head and motioned him to continue. He wouldn’t and insisted I move so - I moved. He then gunned the tank and whoosh came down the barrel and slammed to a halt about five inches above the very spot where I was standing, Luck? Chance? or what? 

Is there really luck or is it just programming in our subconscious that we just happen, luck again, to listen to in taking actions or is it truly luck, chance or serendipity? 

I tend to think it is exposure to many things, perceptions, distinctions taught and learned and changed accordingly, a type of continuous curiosity through an analysis of things into the synthesis or creation of new things and thoughts and ideas and theories that over time program our instincts and procedural memories so that when certain observations from our sense inputs to our orientations to the outer world perceptions vs. our inner world accumulated perceptions to synthesize appropriate sub-routines/functions to work zombie-like toward actions, deeds, and decisions that either achieve a goal that seems to be “good luck” vs. a lack of these traits to be “bad luck.” 

I believe luck comes from our efforts or our lack of efforts to accumulate and formulate various sub-routines, memories, perceptions and functions that either the brain has or does not have thus dictating our experiencing good luck or bad luck. 

What do you think?

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