Luck

I read two interesting tidbits of thought about luck yesterday.

The first comes from Edwidge Danticat's very sad novel, The Farming of Bones. As two of the characters are in the process of fleeing from the horrors of an anti-Haitian massacre in the Dominican Republic, they meet up with a fellow refugee, who asks one of them a strange question:

"Do you have good luck?" Wilner asked Yves.
Yves laughed out loud. "Why do you want to know?" he asked.
"I like to know what kind of luck a man has had before I start on a journey with him," Wilner replied.

The second comes from a New York Times essay on Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow, who has won a sudden string of games despite not being particularly good at most of the central skills of quarterbacking. What he IS good at is getting his teammates to believe that they can win. Frank Bruni writes:

Some people have what can be described only as a gift for winning. . . .This gift usually involves hope, confidence, and a special composure, all of which keep a person in the game long enough, with enough energy and stability, so that a fickle entity known as luck might break his or her way.

This made me ask myself whether I am a lucky person. I think I am. When Lori asked me, on the way to the airport on Sunday, if I had checked the status of my flight, at first the question surprised me. No, I hadn't checked. I knew it would be on time. I fly constantly, at least once a month, and my flights are always on time. (Well, except when they aren't.) In the same way, I'm never sick (except when I am.) I've had a fairly charmed writing career, publishing 45 children's books in the course of some 30 years.

But lately I've felt a tad discouraged about my career. My most recent books haven't gotten many reviews - the reviews they got were lovely, but there were so few of them. Am I being ignored, as a new young generation of authors arrives on the scene? And I haven't even been writing much since I arrived at DePauw. Am I burned out? Washed up? Or whatever fiery or watery metaphor you want to employ?

Well, I'd better not be! Because that Frank Bruni quotation reminded me, that if 90 percent of success is showing up, so is 90 percent of luck. He practically defined success as just hanging in there long enough for luck to kick in.

So, hang in there, my lucky darlings. And here, of course, I'm talking both to you, and to myself.