I heard this story on art and luck on NPR. Really resonated with me. I've ruminated upon luck for a long, long time. Good luck. Bad luck. It's hard to tell how much luck rules our existence. Maybe a lot more than we'd all like to admit. There are happy and unhappy accidents of birth - what happens to that little baby born in North Korea tomorrow? And what about the one born in Beverly Hills, CA?
And if one little detail changed in their stories, one lucky or unlucky break, would everything be different? It's one of those "mind games" we can play, but you can't really figure out what is just "Luck"and what is what happens, is just what happens.
And all our successes and failures… maybe just luck? Or maybe you get a lucky break and then that little success breeds success, or failure breeds failure? As Warren Zevon once sang, "Bad luck streak in dancing school…"
Hard to know. Hard to tell. I remember reading some of those great ancient Greek plays, thinking wow, this is work that has really stood the test of time, amazing work, and then I read that the Greek plays that we revere also happen to be the ones that just survived, by luck, by chance, by circumstance. It's a story of survival more than anything.
What endures, what survives, what succeeds… luck...