It's Friday the 13th today. What better day than to talk about "Luck". My 'older than me' Webster's dictionary calls it... "Chance regarded as the bringer of good or ill fortune." But for me, it's the word that fills the hole in my life left by the absence of the belief of a controlling deity.
There is a clip from an Australian TV show starring Tim Minchin (Lucky) and Milly Alcock (Meg) called "Upright". It's about two very different people who collide on a road and team up to travel across Australia with an upright piano in the back of a truck. There is a conversation that Lucky and Meg have in the first episode that explains so much.
Upright "Nothing happens for a reason" clip
Meg: I don't believe in accidents.
Lucky: Oh, great, I'll tell the car hire company.
Meg: No, dickhead. I believe in car accidents. I just don't believe in... accidents, as in…
Lucky: Coincidences.
Meg: Coincidences, coincidences, yeah. Yeah, I don't believe in coincidences. Everything happens for a reason. It's just, like too many things have to happen to make a thing happen. You know? If I'd have done one thing different today, one tiny thing, like if I'd have brushed my teeth for longer, then I wouldn't have been on the road at that specific point, would I? And maybe you would've ran into somebody else and... and killed them or ran into a tree and been crashed in a... a burning wreck, and I wouldn't... have even known or given a shit.
Lucky: Have you heard of ELO?
Meg: Earlobe?
Lucky: ELO, British fusion band from the 1970's, ELO? Oh, it doesn't matter.
Meg: No.
Lucky: So, one of the founding members of ELO was Mike Edwards, right? A cellist.
Meg: What’s a cellist?
Lucky: It’s a person who plays the cello.
Meg: Right.
Lucky: Anyway, one day Mike Edwards is driving along a road
in Devon, in England. And one of those huge hay bales rolls down a hill and lands on his car. Kills him instantly. He didn't even know what hit him.
What are the chances, hay? Well...Devon is pretty hilly, so let's say, one in ten of those hay bales sits on some kind of slope. And maybe one in a thousand of them sometimes goes for a little roll. And let's say maybe one in twenty of those slopes leads to a road where a car goes past any given point some number of times an hour. And maybe one in every three or four thousand of the drivers of those cars is an artist of some repute.
So, the chances that one day one of those hay bales was gonna kill a moderately well known cellist is...reasonably high. Well, not high, but...The thing is, when the numbers are big enough, which they are, one in a million things happen all the time.
Nothing happens for a reason. Or everything happens for no reason. One of those.
Meg: You are so boring.
"When the numbers are big enough, which they are, one in a million things happen all the time." Lucky
Understanding this premise means I can let go of the need for the cosmos to be controlled by an external source. It becomes easier to explain life with luck or chance being the driving force now. I'm still not that good at explaining much, but I can understand what's probable because this simple conversation. It doesn't exclude the possibilities of something other than luck or chance. It allows for people to hold on to their beliefs if that is what works for them. It just gives someone like me something else that makes a little more sense than what I had before. That was all I was looking for.
( Upright is an Australian comedy drama television series created by Chris Taylor that premiered on 28 November 2019 on Sky Atlantic in the United Kingdom, and on 1 December 2019 on Fox Showcase in Australia.[1] The series stars Tim Minchin and Milly Alcock in the lead roles, with Minchin also writing and composing.[2] The series was later broadcast on Super Channel in Canada and on SundanceNow in the USA.
In October 2021, the series was renewed for a second season, which premiered in its entirety on 15 November 2022 on Fox Showcase in Australia and moved to Sky Comedy in the UK.[3])
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