I remember my school teachers preparing us for exams. ‘There’s no such thing as luck!’ they would say.  They were wrong.  Of course there is.  If I spend forty hours preparing answers for Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing and Othello, only to find the examiner has decided to ask me about The Taming of the Shrew, that’s luck.  Bad luck.

Some people are fond of challenging any use of the word ‘luck’.  An acquaintance pulls me up each time I say, ‘That was lucky!’  I’m inclined to come out with that phrase when I pull the washing in just as it starts to rain, or when a cat ducks between my front and rear tyres, narrowly escaping death.  My acquaintance doesn’t believe in luck. 

So I asked her, if she doesn’t believe in luck, what’s the alternative belief?  Unless you believe in luck, surely you are a fatalist.  (The phrase ‘fatal accident’ has lent negative connotations to the term ‘fatalist’ so let’s avoid that by using the phrase ‘predestination’.)  Surely if you don’t believe in luck, you believe in predestination.

Sure enough, this doesn’t sit happily with my acquaintance either, because she believes that our choices lead us to our destinations.  I’m in agreement there.  Believing in predestination is quite a frightening prospect, though not entirely incomprehensible; if you are able to believe that people always make the best choices with the information they have, it is possible to conceive of predestination.  This is because not everybody has the information, the education or the mental faculties to make good choices, so even a heinous murder might have seemed like a good idea at the time.  The previous experiences of a murderer might have led to a crime as surely as predestination would have.

Anyhow, if you believe in neither luck nor predestination, what do you believe in?  Is there another, middle ground?  I don’t think so.  It’s like being atheist or theist.  You can sit on the fence and say you’re agnostic.  The problem in this particular case, however, is that my acquaintance denounces both ends of the spectrum without acknowledging a middle ground.  This bothers me when she challenges my frequent use of the word ‘luck’.  I might add that this acquaintance is a fundamentalist Christian, and I’ve heard Christian leaders, too, preach that there’s no such thing as luck.

So I ask what she thinks when something bad happens.  Does she deserve it, in some way, if she’s sick or robbed?  No, she says.  That’s not luck.  That, apparently, is ‘misfortune’.

I roll my eyes.  Synonyms, no?  No, apparently.  The word ‘luck’ has several different interpretations.  Luck can mean simply ‘the events or circumstances that operate for or against an individual’.  And that’s the kind of luck I’m talking about.  Luck can also, of course, point to another higher being, meaning ‘a force that brings good fortune or adversity’.  This interpretation does not sit happily with Christianity.  Luck can also mean ‘superstitious’ luck.  Nor does the Christian church look kindly upon superstitious beliefs.

If you are one of the many people I have met who says you ‘don’t believe in luck’, please bear in mind that there are numerous modern interpretations of the word.  Avoid pulling other people up on their casual use of the word, because in most instances, I doubt they’re even talking about the same concept as you.  If you’re lucky, you’ll have a very interesting philosophical discussion.