“Where did he go?” I sometimes wonder. I realize I haven’t seen someone at work in a long time, and wonder, whatever happened to so-and-so?
The big shots have tributes and farewell parties. They send farewell e-mails to “All,” and in the privacy of their cubicles, their friends shed tears and their enemies rejoice.
Sometimes a co-worker dies. I’ve been shaken to find out I’ll never see a certain person again, and find it odd that so often we come to the most decisive moments with no inkling whatever. It’s sad to think that he had worked there for 20 years, and surfed the Internet on the computer, and sat in that same stall in the bathroom countless times, but when he did those things for the very last time– when he turned in his keys and walked out that door, thinking he’d do the same things tomorrow– he had no idea that all that was finished.
Other people know well in advance how their retirement will play out. “Ten more years,” he thinks. Then, one more year, one more month, one more day…. It’s fun to talk with someone going through that. “Just think– this is your last time to walk across this floor on your way to your office!” She smiles, nods, and laughs. “How great it must be to know that,” I think, knowing there’s always the chance that I myself have arrived here to work for the very last time. If the giant human-eating crows from outer space invade Earth today, maybe none of us will be going to work tomorrow.
Maybe it’ll be a giant earthquake. An asteroid. Mount Rainier could blow its top. A tsunami could strike. A catastrophe at home.
But one must plan for the future. “Inshallah.” “God willing.” One needn’t say those things to deeply know how they are so true.
A lucky break might bring things to a sudden end.
Good luck is not a cloud that does not have a black lining, though. It’s akin to a great fallacy of sports analysis, wherein commentators imagine that if only that player hadn’t been picked off base, he would have scored when the next batter hit a home run. That’s easy to say, and the picked-off base runner has every reason to take that as true, but if he hadn’t been picked off, the dynamics of the game would have been different enough that the pitcher probably wouldn’t have thrown that same pitch that got hit for the home run, and the batter would not have been in the same frame of mind that prepared him to hit the home run.
So an observer can think, “What good luck for so-and-so! Now he can enjoy what he has and proceed with his life, knowing he is the type of person who has what he now has.”
Not true. He is the same person he was before his good fortune, except that now he has the burden of trying to justify his good luck by living as if he deserved it, which is the same thing as expecting him to live as if he had accomplished something he might have liked to accomplish, but never actually did.
If you can then live as a responsible custodian of your good fortune, you can respect yourself as someone who has been prepared by life to have the good character, sound judgment and common sense to not squander an opportunity.
Luck is not a thing we can be certain of, be it ostensibly good or bad, because we never know whether things are ultimately to the good, or bad, as one might have an all-encompassing vision of our places in the spacetime inclusive of now, then, and hereafter.
Within the overarching reality encompassing us all in unknown causes and effects, cosmology and eschatology, it’s refreshing to have an occasional moment of clarity to savor– school is out! To leave a job for the last time, and happily imagine others thinking, “Whatever happened to that guy who always used to be there?”