The Paradox of Luck and Happiness

At a recent book signing, someone asked me, “After everything you’ve been through, what does luck mean to you now?”

It is the kind of question that sounds simple until you try to answer it.

Part of the difficulty, for me, is language. In modern English, luck and happiness have drifted apart. One belongs mostly to chance, the other to feeling. Yet the old bond survives in the word itself. “Happiness” still carries hap within it, that older sense of fortune, of what befalls us. In Polish, my native language, the union is still intact. Szczęście can mean good luck, but also a deeper sense of being content, at peace, somehow right with life. Perhaps (another little hap!) that is why the question still follows me.

In Lucky Me, the protagonist insists that luck is not the avoidance of pain. Quite the opposite. He finds it in failure, bankruptcy, heartbreak, in all the things that bruised him and, in doing so, made him real. At one point he quotes Bachelard, who says that every moment is both giver and plunderer. That felt true to me when I was younger. Perhaps it still does.

But age changes the sound of certain words.

If I once thought luck meant surviving intensity, I now think it may mean something closer to spokój. Peace. Not the peace of having no problems, which is rare enough to be suspicious, but the quieter kind. The kind that comes when you no longer feel compelled to prove yourself to the world, or even to yourself.

I used to think I was lucky because I had endured so much. Now I think I may be lucky because, after all that noise, I can finally appreciate quiet.

That, at least today, seems close enough to happiness.