So every so often (at least once a year), because of the way our calendar works, there comes a day where people become increasingly superstitious because they believe the combination of the number and the day of the week as the supernatural ability to make them particularly unlucky. This According to my friend Wikipedia, a study done by the Stress Management Center and Phobia Institute in Ashville, North Carolina states that 17 to 21 MILLION people are afraid of this day. I find this number incredibly high, but the more I dwell on this day, the more I find myself thinking about something very essential to it's existence--luck.
What is luck? It's supposed to be some kind of outside force that influences the way the world works, favoring certain individuals over others. But if you have ever played any Role-Playing Games (I am of course a huge nerd) luck is always something that increases with level or the use of particular items. This somewhat silly illustration implies, however, that luck is something we actually have control over. And of course the only way to prove this is with a series of nerdy references.
In The Dark Knight, Harvey Dent uses a two-faced coin to make his own luck. When he seems to leave things up to chance, people are more likely to pay attention because there is a sense of uncertainty. It also makes things more impressive when they go his way, and he seems less responsible for what comes to pass. However, when he becomes Two-Face and uses chance to decide whether people live or die, this transference of responsibility goes to an extreme and Harvey claims that chance is the only unbiased, fair decider in matters of conflict. So luck, is in some ways, the universe making decisions for us? Not so much. (I should mention that the only other thing that is called "fair" in this movie is "chaos" by the Joker--and we all know that luck can be quite a chaotic force.)
Sometimes I feel like it's easier for people to blame their own faults or shortcomings or inadequacies on luck--not only in uncontrollable things like appearance and sets of talents, but also in their performance at certain tasks. You get picked for a job not because you are lucky, but because you know someone. You do better in a competition because you practiced, not because some cosmic force pushed you across the finish line. And I think the most blunt way to put this comes from Master Obi-Wan Kenobi, who tells hot shot Han Solo that "In my experience, there's no such thing as luck."
What I like about this assessment is that while there is no such thing as luck, there is "the force"--this great thing in the universe that keeps everything in a kind of balance. For me that's God, but in general I think that things have more of a purpose than is readily apparent. Luck is a way to explain away the bad and minimize the good, but I have this odd notion that there are no coincidences. What is good now may be bad later and vice versa, but ultimately I think everything happens for a reason. We're just lucky if we ever get to find out what that reason is...
For me, Friday the 13th has always been a lucky day, if only because none of these days have been particularly unlucky. Luck, on the other hand, remains this sort of relativistic measure that allows us to judge the world. It is this out-of-our-hands element of our lives that has been called upon for thousands of years, with names like Fortune or Chance. But at the same time it is also a state of mind. The Roman dramatist Seneca once wrote that "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." Friday the 13th, is our yearly opportunity to reexamine luck for ourselves. Good luck...
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