Patricia Hunt: Do you feel lucky? Should you?

According to my horoscope, I am going to get a chance to meet someone I have always wanted to know. I just can’t figure out how my path might cross with that of Robert Redford.

Actually, our paths did cross once on a bitterly cold day in New York City. I had on an Eddie Bauer down jacket with hood suitable for an Arctic expedition. On my feet were L.L. Bean gum boots. Few people were out. I scanned the sidewalk ahead of me and recognized a face, but who was it? I flipped through a mental rolodex until Redford came up. Only then did I look back at him because staring is against the rules of the street in big cities. When he caught me, he smiled. I think he knew I had been trying to place him.

My brush with Redford was probably the reason he came to mind when I read my horoscope. I don’t really believe in the horoscopes published in newspapers and magazines, but I can’t pass one up. I know it is irrational. I want to believe something good is heading my way. Good and bad things are surely headed my way, and I often don’t remember what my horoscope said five minutes after I read it, but I read it anyway. Do I like to read it because I believe in the role of chance in life?

Dr. Seuss, Ted Geisel, had been rejected by 27 publishers when he happened to run into an old friend who had just become an editor of children’s books. He told the man of his rejections and that he intended to destroy his book. His friend asked to take a look at it and got it published to very good reviews. A career was launched. Geisel speculated that had he been a block away on another street, he would never have become a children’s author.

I used to read criticisms of women by women for “failing to own their accomplishments” because research showed they grant a larger role to luck in their successes than do men. There was no criticism of men for ignoring the role of luck. Religious traditions tend to interpret luck as “blessings.” Some people seem to believe that blessings are not gifts at all but rewards bestowed upon them because they deserve them.  

Americans like to believe that we create our luck, our accomplishments. Oprah, among others, has popularized the “law of attraction,” which maintains that we attract to us people and circumstances that on the face of it appear to be random luck. It looks suspiciously to me like a way of assigning blame or credit for chance or perhaps blessings. Isn’t the truth more complicated?

I find it ironic that while preaching hard work and responsibility, we are willing to encourage people to buy lottery tickets, thereby shifting some responsibility for financing the state budget to people whose belief in luck we denigrate. I doubt a single person running for president has ever bought a lottery ticket. The people who buy them are pretty sure that the only way they will have a lot of money is by holding the winning ticket. No one is going to pay them a $55,000-a-month retainer to “consult” with Freddie Mac. (A friend ran the numbers and figured that is about what Newt Gingrich got if you divided his pay by the number of months he worked.)

There is a complex weaving of luck, labor and blessings in life. As I shift through my own years, I find it difficult to separate the threads one from another.

If I am serious about contributing my fair share to the state budget, I should probably buy lottery tickets. Meanwhile, if I get to meet Robert Redford, I will let you know.

Patricia Hunt of Staunton is a columnist for The News Virginian.