As I sit here teetering on the verge of another birthday, I can’t help but think how lucky I have been.
Not a Las Vegas kind of luck – the most I’ve ever won gambling is $4 – but it’s a kind of luck that really can’t
be explained.
For example, when I was a baby, an Air Force bomber crashed into the neighborhood where my family lived. It was on the island of Guam, and the B-29 had engine trouble and turned back to Andersen Air Force Base. It didn’t make it to the runway, and cartwheeled through our neighborhood, killing many neighbors and the people aboard the plane.
Much of the area was a disaster, but my family was unscathed.
I can’t explain that, nor can I explain an incident that happened a few years later in north Florida.
I was playing Tarzan with the neighborhood kids, swinging on a rope across a road. I’ll stipulate that swinging on ropes through traffic does not generally lead to a long life, but hey, I was a dumb kid, doing what dumb kids are prone to do.
When it was my turn, I managed to fall off the rope – in front of a truck. Quick reflexes on the part of the driver and good brakes on the part of the truck were the only things that prevented me from becoming a seven-year-old grease spot.
How can I ever explain that? Why didn’t that plane destroy our house, the way it destroyed the houses on both sides? What would have happened if that truck driver had been daydreaming or fiddling with the radio?
It makes me wonder. And it makes me thankful that sometimes – many times – luck is on our side.
There have been other times when I was sure my luck was running out. I spent a week at St. Mary’s Hospital at the Mayo Clinic. What was supposed to be a routine gall bladder operation – one of those where you go home in the afternoon – turned into a six-hour surgery that could have been the end of the road.
Then there are other encounters I just can’t explain.
Some time ago my brother had a heart attack and was really struggling. I was staying at a little motel near the hospital and struck up a conversation with one of the maids. She asked why I was there and I explained. She looked me square in the eyes, took my hands and said: “You know he’ll be all right.”
She was 100% correct. My brother has had his ups and downs but he’s been doing much better. I wonder about her, and I wonder about some of the other chance encounters I have over the past 67 years.
Like the time I begrudgingly attended a banquet and met the woman who would become my wife.
Or the time I saw thousands of butterflies on the trees lining the road near our little farm in Minnesota. Their wings were moving in unison, as if they were breathing. I never imagined such a thing was even possible.
All of the above was a product of luck. Religious people would describe it as something else entirely. They would be right, too.
So what’s it all mean? What’s the take-home message for me and the other seven billion occupants of Planet Earth?
Maybe it’s as simple as this: We’re really not in charge. We are passengers in this great adventure called life. Oh, we can nudge our course in one direction or another, but overall, what happens is something far beyond our control.
And that’s the beautiful mystery of it all.
