Lucky

“Has anyone supposed it is lucky to be born? I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.” – Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

This essay has been edited from its original form, first published to the True Nature community on July 4, 2025

Global politics have been contributing to untold millions of people feeling stress above and beyond ordinary individual challenges with career, relationships, and health: there’s a battle for the soul of the United States that no one can fully escape. Is it unlucky to live within the borders of this country at this time, or lucky? Does the answer to that question depend on your citizenship status and political leanings, or more upon your personality and perspectives about what it is to be lucky?

The last time someone insisted to me I was lucky, I noticed it came across as a resentful demand thinly disguised as a compliment. The demand seemed to be:

• Acknowledge that you have more than you deserve
• Acknowledge that I have been shortchanged unfairly by comparison
• Believe that I am in fact paying you a compliment rather than delivering a cut with a rusty blade

It’s rarely kind to pronounce another person to be lucky. Since it means something that happens by chance, it follows that what is being noticed as good fortune is also unearned. While it can be humble and insightful to consider oneself lucky, then, it’s rarely a compliment to proclaim anyone else lucky. 

How could we really ever know what another has earned? I don’t know anyone’s history completely, arguably not even my own. A case could be made that anything at all is either lucky or unlucky and neither lucky nor unlucky - not in the self-determinism sense, but in the sense that there may simply be no such thing as good luck or bad luck, even while conditions can certainly be delightful, painful, and subject to chance.

There’s a famous story about a farmer who lost his horse, gained more horses, had his only son injured by one of the new horses, and then his son survived a war because he was too injured to fight. At every turn, the farmer’s neighbors would insist he was unlucky, then lucky, then unlucky, then lucky again. The farmer would reply each time, “good luck, bad luck, who knows?”

With a long view, lucky and unlucky completely lose their meaning as conditions continually change. With a short view, one could say those words have even less significance, since lucky and unlucky each assume some implication for the future that is yet unknown.

And yet - what about the good fortune of having a perspective like that of the farmer that allows a person to be grounded and wise in the face of both abundance and loss?

Another ancient story tells of a blind turtle that rises up from the bottom of the ocean once every hundred years. The listener is asked to consider the odds of that turtle rising up and poking its head through a small piece of wood with a single hole in it that happened to be floating in the vast ocean exactly above where the turtle was coming up for air. 

The image is said to represent how rare it is to be born human, and then to have the myriad conditions necessary to hear the dharma coincide so that one has the opportunity to understand their true nature and become free from needless suffering.

If it is lucky to be born, then, it is even more lucky to also have this opportunity now, regardless of any of our conditions.

It’s immaterial to me what proportion of my seeming successes and failures at this point could be ascribed to chance versus personal volition; the important thing is to deepen and clarify my understanding now that I have the chance.

On the other hand - if you were to tell me I am lucky to be on this path and to have the earnestness to waver so little . . . I would agree with you.  

In the spirit of taking refuge in the sangha, we hope you’ll post your response to this essay on our Ghost page. Sharing our questions and insights can build community, nurture engagement, and encourage others on the path.

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