Acting Citizen: Running out of Luck?

By James Knudsen

March milestones are piling up. March 10, I turned 57; March 13, the run of “Guys and Dolls” ended; March 17, St. Patrick’s Day; and, March 20, Spring arrived. Is it possible to connect all of these events? Let’s find out.
    March 10, 2022. Myself and the cast of “Guys and Dolls” begin our final week of performance. It is not the first time I have found myself performing on my birthday. I hope it won’t be the last. Fifty-seven is, from this vantage point, a terribly blasé birthday. It’s well past 50, but still far enough away from 60 to not feel like...well, 60. It no doubt helped to be in a dressing room with four older actors, as in older than me. One, upon hearing my age, remarked, “A mere slip of a lad.” And at this point I should add, the idea of mortality has not sunk in completely.

Wassail!

Very good condition. 5-speed manual transmission. 159,000 miles. 2009 radio with AUX jack. Dog-friendly (poodle shown inside car in photo isn't included, however).

I told a friend this morning that my wife and I had had good luck selling our 1992 Volvo through Craigslist. "I posted the ad Tuesday afternoon, and we accepted a $200 deposit yesterday."
    "It wasn't luck," my friend said.
    "Oh, then what was it?"
    "The divine mercy of God."
    Thank you very much!
    She said that if I was killed in an automobile crash, that too would be the divine mercy of God.
    Thank you very much indeed!

"This fear of things invisible, is the natural seed of...religion." –Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651.

Word of the Day from dictionary.com:

wassail \WAH-sul; wah-SAYL\, noun:

1. An expression of good wishes on a festive occasion, especially in drinking to someone.
2. An occasion on which such good wishes are expressed in drinking; a drinking bout; a carouse.
3. The liquor used for a wassail; especially, a beverage formerly much used in England at Christmas and other festivals, made of ale (or wine) flavored with spices, sugar, toast, roasted apples, etc.

Wassail is from the Middle English expression of festive benevolence, wæs hæil!, be well!, from Old Norse ves heill, be (ves) well (heill).

Wassail! As in "Good luck" or "May your deity richly bless you and kill you in a car crash today only if 'he' really thinks that's what you most need."
    Seriously.

I'm lucky, but I could be toast....

This morning, one of those rare occasions when I had toast for breakfast, I fumbled a piece and it landed butter-side-down on the floor. Then, a few minutes later, a section of my kiwi fruit jumped off the cutting board. One of those days?, I vaguely wondered.
    Of course, the day is still young and it might yet be "one of those days" (I could even die today or suffer a horrible accident), but I still feel lucky that things will generally go my way. As Bill said in his comment on yesterday's post, my luck [usually] far exceeds my embarrassment.

Karen Pryor's 2009 book, Reaching the Animal Mind, has to be one of the most eye-opening, inspirational books I've ever read. The opening of Chapter 12, "Intention":

Gerry Martone was working for the U.S. Peace Corps when he ran into a particularly dangerous situation. Gerry was assigned to a country in Africa where the political situation was becoming highly unsettled. During a sudden and bloody uprising he and some other aid workers, inadvisedly walking through the capital city, are captured by a band of militants and hauled away in a truck.
    This is not a good thing. No one is really in charge of these rebel soldiers, and there are no rules. Aid workers and other innocent bystanders in similar situations in other countries have been held for ransom, killed out of hand, or beaten and tortured and then killed for no known reason. The natural reaction of the hostages is anger and panic. Gerry's coworkers start crying, arguing that they are harmless noncombatants, and pleading for release. That natural response emphasizes their victim status. It also emphasizes the captor status of the bunch of guys in the front of the truck, who are already exhilarated, drunk, stoned, and a bit out of control.
    Gerry takes a different tack. He thanks his captors whenever they do something that is, even in the smallest way, a comfort to the hostages. He thanks them for driving smoothly through a sharp turn. He thanks them when they pass the water jug to the back. He says a thank-you for their letting the captives sit down rather than keeping them standing. As they drive through ferocious scenes of looting, fires, and wreckage, he praises and thanks the militants for having picked them up in the first place, thus protecting both the aid workers and themselves from these dangerous conditions.
    What happens? Instead of taking their captives away for malicious purposes, the renegade soldiers deliver them to the safe house of another aid worker on the outskirts of town. Then the soldiers post a guard around the house all night to keep the house safe from other armed militants. A change in the captives' own behavior led to a corresponding change in the other group's behavior, from that of predators to that of protectors.
    Crying and pleading are emotional expressions of submissiveness. Bullying and aggression are emotional expressions of dominance. We share these feelings and these kinds of social displays not just with the primates but with lots of mammals and some birds. No wonder it feels natural; it is. No wonder stopping and thinking and then deliberately doing something else feels contrived, artificial, even morally wrong.
    But using reinforcement isn't really about changing the behavior of others; it's about changing what you do yourself. And while on the surface that may seem artificial, changing your own behavior by intention is a fundamental act of survival in the natural world. [pp. 213-214]

Too embarrassing

When my wife noticed yesterday that I had emptied my wallet of its contents to let everything dry out, I told her it would be too embarrassing to tell her why.
    "You dropped it in the toilet!?"
    I replied with cunning, "I told you it would be too embarrassing to tell you."

I was fortunate that she thought I'd confirmed her toilet hypothesis, for what actually happened would have been far more embarrassing to talk about. I had left my wallet on the roof of my car Saturday afternoon and it had lain in 0.42 inches of rainfall that afternoon and night.
    I know precisely how much rain it had withstood, for I finally figured out that I must have left the wallet on top of my car at Lowe's Home Improvement Center before going home and installing our new rain gauge....
    Possibly even more embarrassing is that this was far from the first time I'd left something on top of my car, although it was the first time I'd left a wallet containing cash and IDs and credit cards....

I am so lucky that I have never removed the front-rack wind baffle that my daughter had on her Honda Accord before it passed to me about fifteen years ago. That wind baffle is great for keeping things from blowing off the top!

"God takes care of his children"

Waiting in a line this morning at the university transportation office to renew my bus pass, I overheard the story of the guy ahead of me. Motorcycle rider, multiple parking passes, one of which he'd returned but was still being billed for. But the clerk helping him was smoothing everything out and seemed to conceive of herself as one of God's angels or something, for she said, "God takes care of his children, doesn't he?" And the guy said, "You got that right."

Well...not really. The lucky ones, maybe. The ones who don't suffer and die prematurely, like my friend Gary, who's not expected to make it after suffering massive brain injuries in a motorcycle accident the other day, right before the eyes of his wife, on her own Harley behind him.

But even Gary's wife asked her friends to pray for him, as though Gary's disastrous fall of the roulette ball could be made right by a miraculous intervention. As though Gary could yet be one of the lucky ones of God's children, even though his being hit and run off the road by the vehicle he was trying to pass (as it pulled out itself to pass the vehicle ahead) seemed to have demonstrated that he was very much not one of those.

People want to believe that they're lucky, that they're being taken care of. It helps them somehow to believe that. Some of them even make up elaborate explanations of why the apparently unlucky ones are really being taken care of anyway, in some mysterious way that surpasses human understanding. The crab that gets sucked in and eaten by a cuttlefish has just gone home to God, by God!

Oh yeah, I'm sure.

Serendipity

Today's Word^*

serendipity \ser-uhn-DIP-uh-tee\, noun:

The faculty or phenomenon of making fortunate accidental discoveries.

"Still, I was more subject to serendipity than I yet knew. Soon risk, chance, and a letter from Sir Alun Reese-Jones, the Master of Trinity, my college at Cambridge, were to set my life on an adventurous course."
            – David Freeman, One of Us

"Yet even as I planned a rough route, leaving plenty of room for serendipity, I was uncomfortably aware that journeys have a way of creating their own momentum."
            – Lesley Hazleton, Driving to Detroit

"There again, perhaps because of serendipity, or an especially conscientious team of doctors, it can also happen that the crucial clues are noticed and recorded for posterity."
            – Edward Hooper, The River

The word serendipity was formed by English author Horace Walpole (1717-1797) from Serendip (also Serendib), an old name for Sri Lanka, in reference to a Persian tale, "The Three Princes of Serendip," whose heroes "discovered, quite unexpectedly, great and wonderful good in the most unlikely of situations, places and people."

Long a devotee of serendipity myself, I admit that I have taken my own pleasure in numerous serendipities in my life. With a colder eye now, though, I observe that we probably encounter just as many things in life (if not more) that could be unfortunate accidental discoveries. But so far as I know we don't have a word for that. We have the word serendipity because it serves us better and makes us happy to focus on and accentuate the positive. Rather, I suppose, like believing in a benevolent God and various other varieties of favorable magic. We believe in what we want or need to believe in.
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* http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/