Fickle Finger Of Fate
“Chance” in a positive sense comes in two species:
Fortune and the avoidance of Misfortune.
True story: This dude, charicatured here as a sort of hapless loser, survived an astonishing series of deadly situations. A train derailment into a river drowning 17, an airplane crash that killed everyone else on board, three serious (and bizarre) car accidents and after all that, hit by a bus. He then won $1,110,000 in a lottery. He gave the money away in order to continue his simple!!! frugal life.
Did he play any part in this or was it just outrageous fortune? Do any of us make things happen or does life just happen to us? Are we merely witnesses to random events that just bump us one way or the other?
Is this the chaos of God playing dice?
When I finished high school I took a job working in the mail room of a printing company. They had contracts with the Toronto Sun and half a dozen weekly community papers in the GTA. I worked from midnight until 8am five days a week except Wednesday which was midnight until noon. It was hard work, stacking newspapers on skids as they came off the press. This job was part of a plan I had to get into the music business. I needed sixteen hundred dollars to buy a Hammond organ. The pay was two dollars and fifteen cents an hour. My father charged me ten dollars a week for room and board and I brought sandwiches to work to avoid the costly vending machines.
I started the job the second week of January 1973. By May I had eight hundred dollars saved. I went to see the bank manager and asked for a loan. I was 19! He agreed immediately to lend me eight hundred dollars without a co-signer (he must have recognized my determination) and I bought the organ. For the rest of that year I continued working, paid off the loan and started looking for a band. Not a local band. No, I was scouring the ads for a working established Toronto band. I checked out a few things without much “luck” and then:
“Walkers Road reforming. Need keyboards and vocals. Call …….”
I called. It turned out to be a group that had disbanded a few months earlier but had worked the bar circuit steadily for two years. The reason they were reforming was to back a well known TV talk show host who was taking a shot at a singing career. I auditioned and got the job. Some of my pals out in the sticks here in Mississauga were surprised.
“How’d you get a gig like that?” they asked.
“Just lucky, I guess” was my reply.
In 1975 I joined a band called Atlantis. The bass player was Brent Eikhard, brother of Shirley Eikhard who was a high profile Canadian singer-songwriter at the age of just 20.
Atlantis was a back up band for two singers who were under contract to a manager who didn’t like us for some reason. He fired all of us except the drummer.That was December of 1975.
“Hey, my sister’s looking for a piano player. You interested?” Brent asked me
“Let me think about it YES!!!”
Back in the sticks:
“How’d you get a gig like that?”
“Just lucky, I guess”
Before I go on, let me explain why this was such a big deal to me. Not only was Shirley unbelievably talented, she was also highly regarded by the musical community conferring instant credibility to me, and a real sweetheart. I’m using past tense like she’s some long lost acquaintance. I’m happy to say that after a number of years of no contact we are back to being good friends and we keep in touch.
This “just lucky” business repeated itself quite a few times in my career.
The Oxford dictionary defines luck as “success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one’s own actions”.
A couple of points here:
1. There’s no question that serendipity plays a part in success. But is it really “chance” if you not only put yourself in a position where opportunities are possible but are prepared enough to ace them when they do arise?
2. Is this whole issue about whether or not we possess free will and self determination irrelevant and a waste of time? Maybe, but some serious scientific research has gone into this in the last 20 years. Does it make any difference if our subconscious is or isn’t tricking us into believing we’re making the decisions?
Let’s have some opinions