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Friday Thoughts 83 - Lucky or Fortunate?

Writer's picture: EAWEAW

Updated: May 21, 2022

As I have said before, I have been listening to Stephen Bartlett and something he mentioned really hit home with me. It isn’t the firs time I have thought about it, so it isn’t anything ground-breaking, but it is something which I have really been reflecting on recently, especially in the current situation. Am I (or are any of us) lucky or are we fortunate? To me, luck is something which you cannot control but fortune comes from yourself. Way back when I was a stroppy teenager studying A Level Religious Studies, we were being taught to question and taught to debate. I recall a time at a youth group where we were being ‘encouraged’ to be not only dismissive of other groups who held different religious beliefs but to believe they were damned. This was not an ideology I felt comfortable with and wasn’t something I could subscribe to. If I thought I was ‘stroppy’, at this point I Was nothing compared to my then best friend. She was furious! A fellow RS student (although at a different college) she was well versed in how to pick apart an argument and construct a rebuttal. For the first time, I heard the phrase ‘accident of birth’ (I think it was a new concept to my friend too – probably something they had just covered in an ethics class). By this, we were not referring to being an unintended pregnancy, but the situation in which one finds themselves to be born into. I do not intend to go further into the discussion and the justifications of our unmitigated disagreement with the ideas suggested, but rather more into the concept of universal chaos!

So, fortune vs luck. Luck, to me, in this sense and at its most basic, is which family you are born into, the country or society in which you are born and the other many total uncontrollables (I think I made up a new word there) of life. Fortune is what one makes of the experiences and opportunities presented to us. Again, luck is, generally, the result of statistical probability (although that in itself is a human construct of data gathered) and even so-called good or bad luck is not always so straightforward. Generally speaking, one’s lifestyle choices or environmental factors have an impact on this luck, although there are just occasions when there are seemingly totally random occurrences (I am fairly confident that a mathematician would disagree and say there is no such thing). Anyway, I digress once again. I have long thought that we should change the narrative of so-and-so is so lucky that… or so-and-so is so unlucky because… We should re-frame, generally speaking, to say they are ‘fortunate’. I have no doubt that I totally lucked out with the family into which I was born. Are we perfect? No. Was I safe and well cared for? Yes. Was I happy growing up? Yes, taking into consideration the ‘normal’ teenage angst, generally speaking I was. Did I have everything I needed? Yes. Was I given everything I desired? Definitely not!

I often joke that my upbringing was so monumentally ‘normal’ that I need therapy just for that! I am being flippant. I was raised in a household full of love and care. I was also raised to do what is best for me, to make my own choices and choices that would make me happy. I wasn’t pushed, but I was encouraged and I was exposed to a wide range of opportunities within our sphere of reference. My parents were considered rather maverick for their relative upbringings – they met, married and lived in an area of Birmingham where neither of them were from; they moved ‘away’. They went to Austria on their honeymoon in the mid-1960s. To be fair, that’s not particularly maverick, but it was unusual and, to my very much people-pleasing conservative-with-a-small-c parents, quite revolutionary. I still look back at my university days and the decision to return home for my PGCE. I was ‘lucky’. I was the last year of free university education; the cohort after me had to pay tuition fees so it wasn’t a financial decision. I was ‘lucky’ (although not as lucky as those even two or three years older than me) that house prices had not rocketed and I was able to secure a 100% mortgage as an NQT (and lucky to have a financial guarantor). I was fortunate that I took the opportunity to buy that house yet lucky that the decision to build Doncaster International Airport on the base of RAF Finningley meant that house prices in that particular area significantly increased so we had financial security at a young age (it was still in Doncaster – I am not a multi-millionaire).

I also look back and ponder the path my life was likely to take until a specific defining moment, a ‘sliding doors’ moment if you will. We will all have, in some way or another, experienced a strange feeling when meeting someone new of it being important or in some way potentially life changing. I can clearly see myself still living in the area in which I or my boyfriend at the time did (we met at 6th form) and me working in the same school I did my first teaching placement in. Maybe I would be Head of RE or more senior given I had been there a long time. I can picture so clearly the life I would have. However, I do not live in Birmingham and I am not a secondary school teacher. I live in Shanghai and (all being well and not wishing to tempt fate) will be moving to Jakarta. I am a Head of Primary at a great school and have been appointed to another amazing school. I have been to Syria, walked on the Great Wall of China and fallen in love with the Taj Mahal. Not to mention visiting Angkor Wat, a place I could only dream of when studying Religious Iconography (Rachel and I visited the Sistine Chapel instead after graduating). I am so fortunate and I try to remember that every day. Am I lucky? Hell, yes. I am lucky to have been given the tools that mean I can take these opportunities and embrace new things. I have made so many choices in my life that it would be impossible to count how many things would be different if one small thing had changed. I am spending this lockdown in a 2-bedroom flat having moved out of a 5-bedroom house with a garden and a basement with our own gym equipment. Would I say it was an unlucky move? No! I wouldn’t be ‘anywhere’ else. Do I wish we had left Shanghai 12 months ago as originally planned? Some days, yes, but other days (the vast majority of them) I would not swap a single thing.

I am fortunate, I am lucky. The decisions I have made have put me where I am today both physically, emotionally and metaphorically. My life is not perfect (that is a utopian construct) but it’s pretty bloomin’ great and that’s what keeps me going on the ‘dark days’. I am lucky to have the strength to change what is in my control and I am fortunate to be able to say that.

Life throws all sorts at us and we ‘just’ have to choose how to respond.

So Happy penultimate Friday in May, all and thank you for humouring me.

Music today is Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana from a YouTube playlist selected because of songs by Gin Blossom. What a great name!

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