When we stay open to life’s potential, we may experience luck 运气. Luck can be useful in the quest for positivity. Lucky people are flexible, hopeful, resilient, and open; they mine new opportunities for their own gain and have their eyes peeled for fortune and happy accidents around every corner. Can we be more open to luck?
From their youth, my parents remembered villagers in their homeland panning for gold in a nearby river. Those who panned and hit the jackpot were considered the town’s luckiest. A neighbor was one such charmed soul. He was walking by the river when he stopped to gulp some water. On his knees, he saw a glint that begged for a closer look. A rock covered most of that shiny something; the neighbor moved it and found several gold nuggets, each the size of his thumb. He pocketed these precious lumps and ran home. He didn’t squander away the gold on frivolous material goods. Instead, his windfall afforded him and his kin a house, half a mountain, chickens, and goats. He was so lucky.
Luck sticks to certain people, and not others. The inherently unlucky seem to walk around inviting misfortune. It makes me wonder why kismet keeps finding the lucky ones again and again.
I like to think the lucky ones are open-minded. We make our own luck, argues Richard Wiseman, a psychology professor at the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom and author of The Luck Factor. He notes that we can learn to be curious and lucky in different ways—creating opportunities, feeling lucky, expecting luck to appear wherever and whenever, and seeing the good in the bad. In truth, the lucky are mindful, tolerant, and aware of life’s possibilities. Essentially, the lucky are not mired in negative thinking.
Those who invite good karma are skilled at moving on to the next thing when fortune isn’t showing itself. Sometimes you can’t get that dream job because someone else occupies the seat; therefore, a mental pivot may be required.
Plus, people open to fortune are also open to risk; this is a useful trait if you want to experience life more fully. They have an “I Can Win” quality. Meanwhile, the unlucky often lament how life offers them no miracles of positive karma. Wiseman noted that those who feel cursed, like the person who thinks he is never given a leg up, create self-fulfilling prophecies. You think something will happen, and it will happen: I’m not lucky, and I never will be.
People who experience luck early in life may expect and look for open doors later in life. Meanwhile, those who do not experience good karma early don’t know any better. To put it simply, good tidings beget future good tidings. This is similar to “The Matthew Effect,” which was a term coined in the late 1960s by sociologists Robert Merton and Harriet Zuckerman. The phenomenon is named after the Bible’s Parable of the Talents or Minas in the Gospel of Matthew. This concept acknowledges the advantages of people who are born with more resources. In simple terms, the rich stay rich, so to speak. This also subtly applies to the luck phenomenon. The lucky stay lucky—or at least they think that way.
A Most Amazing Story of Kismet
The most amazing story of luck I know involves my parents during the Chinese Communist Revolution. When Mao Zedong’s revolution marched toward their province in the mid-20th century, the people were frantic. The wealthy and educated tried to flee.
My dad could not secure passage out of the country, but he was educated and worked for the government, so he was in danger. At the very least, my dad was determined to get his family on the plane, which he did. He was left behind.
As an English speaker, he was called upon to translate for visiting foreigners. One was Lieutenant General Claire Lee Chennault, the founder of the Flying Tigers, the First American Volunteer Group of the Republic of China Air Force. My dad had helped Chennault negotiate an airstrip in our hometown. Chennault said to him, “If the Communists catch you, you’re a dead man.” The general told my dad to hide in a pile of lamb’s wool and wait. He hid for three days until Chennault ordered an incoming pilot to whisk Dad away.
What luck.
Meanwhile, my mother thought that she would never see him again and that he would surely die in China. After she and her family arrived in Guangdong, she was puffy-eyed and grief-stricken as she sat on a bench with her mother, watching refugees moving in and out of an elevator. When the elevator opened and closed, she was sure she had glimpsed her husband; at six feet, he was taller than the average Chinaman.
“I think I just saw my husband,” she said, tugging Grandma’s sleeve.
Grandma shook her head. “You’re crying so much that you’re seeing things now.”
A few minutes later, the elevator opened again, and out walked Dad.
I think Dad was lucky because he believed he was, which made him open to looking around and seeing life’s possibilities. I want to be lucky like he was.