How to Measure Luck

Luck, that intangible element of the Universe. Some people live and die by what they perceive to be their luck. Fortunes are made and lost, and here I sit, wondering how this elusive phenomena affects me personally.

I’m not a gambler. I never have been. I do like winning money, and have at times when I’ve rolled the dice, but temper that with the inevitable losing of money and the scales tip into a position I’m not comfortable with. I don’t drive down the highway flinging my money through the window, I don’t set fire to it, and I don’t gamble with it. For me, those three options are equivalents. But that doesn’t mean that luck doesn’t affect me and my world, because I’m very attuned to its perceived polarity.

For instance: I had a string of days where every time I pushed the button for the elevator at work the doors would open instantly, with no waiting involved. For those seven or eight days I was certain that I was being bombarded by cosmic love.

I measure my luck every day in some minute way. When I make the bed (weekly), I lay down the fitted sheet corner with the tag on it first, because I know which corner to fold it over for the sheet to fit right. When I pick up the sheet and grab a corner, I know it’s a lucky week if the first corner I grab has the tag. Luck decreases exponentially with every corner I grab subsequently, and if I make it all the way back to the original corner and find it there–find that I’d missed it when I first picked it up–then I know there is no cosmic love for me this week.

Getting held up by a train is a sure sign of bad luck for me. Or a bad commute in general. If I flip a coin I always pick heads–that way the cosmic love will know what I’m going to pick every time, and we don’t want to confuse the cosmic love. If it comes up tails, I know the love is out for the moment. But I can always go two out of three, best of ten…might as well just keep it going, right? Unfortunately, if the love is out I’ll invariably lose out no matter how many times I go. So I just keep it to one flip. I find that I’m a fifty percentile guy–That is, I’ve got the cosmic love half the time, and half the time I don’t. That’s a lot better than some people, probably most people, but not nearly as good as many.

There are always people who it seems the Universe just loves to heap love upon. You probably know some of them yourself. These are your high-percentage people, those who flip a coin and hit between fifty and seventy percent every time. It seems like they always draw the winning number, get the promotions, never get ticketed for speeding though they always speed.  I’ve known a few people like that, who it seemed could never do any wrong. I wonder if they can hold on to that intangible quality for their whole lives, or if it fades eventually just like everything else. Does it fade, so that their percentages drop occasionally? I assume it does for everyone, except up middle-of-the-road folks–we stay comfortably in the median, with only a little variance in polarity. But a sixty percentile person? Next year they may run into a string of forties, and that’s when you know the Universe is just shitting all over you. They may stay in the sixties for years–for a decade, even–but when they bottom out you know it’s bad. Forty-five percent is rock bottom for some. Look for suicide when the numbers drop below twenty. Nobody can bear to be out of favor with the Cosmos.

And, of course, just as the Cosmos loves some, it seems to hate others. The downtrodden, the destitute, so many people who seem to get no love, no more. It’s cyclical, of course, just as everything else is. Is our luck influenced by our personalities? If I’m a better person, does that mean my luck will be better? I think we all know the answer to that question. We’ve grown up now, and we know that all cops are not good, that all criminals are not bad…that sometimes the wrong guy hangs. Good does not always triumph over evil.

Does any of that have anything at all to do with luck? Got me. All I know is I’m on heads today, and tomorrow is a day away.