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LUCK - It is what we must live with in self-protection, both bane and benefit where bane can slip past the horizon line into the darkness that is the legal system. With that said, let me state emphatically, "There is no such thing as luck!" All things that happen in our lives have a cause (cause ’n’ effect), it is not about chance or fate for we make that ourselves by the way we learn, prepare and study...physical and mental studies along with applications and practices.
We use luck as a means to excuse ourselves from our personal responsibilities especially when it comes to the good or bad that happens in our lives. It comes down to our attitudes, beliefs and perceptions of each lesson or moment of experience in our lives.
When we say 'luck' we are simply providing ourselves an excuse that self-soothes our ego's and emotions. It is a way to excuse our lack of preparedness. Even when the unknown of the unknown occurs there is always some action or thought or attitude we could have had or used to avoid, etc.
I remember a Navy Seal who told me a story of how he had to perform some very dangerous training exercise for some Admiral. He was sitting in all his gear preparing to have the space flooded and the outer hull to open into the sea. Needless to say the exercise went well and the Admiral was properly impressed but the Seal was not satisfied, he felt that he could have been better prepared. This led to a life long belief that one should prepare, prepare, prepare for every possible event, planned or unplanned.
Leaving too much to the chance one will succeed was not a good plan toward success, so it boils down to learning what you know so well it can be labeled as mastery; learning what you don't know so well it can be labeled and mystic; and learning what you don't know you don't know so well it can be called enlightenment. That takes hard work!
Luck is an excuse much like saying, "I'll Try." Try and luck are both terms that when used simply tell our minds we now have an excuse to fail. We don't try, we do; we don't allow chance or luck to affect our way, we do!
In the martial arts and karate communities the question begs, "Just how much are we dependent on luck to carry us through?" If you find yourself thinking how lucky you are or were then consider that something is missing and you need to find out what that is and train for it.
It's about balancing out chance by taking the actions necessary to reduce chance to practically nill or null. There is no luck and what chance comes must come exclusively from the chaos of life, chaos you should be studying so that you achieve enlightenment where actions, thoughts and attitudes take you seemingly naturally toward "natural-avoidance," in all things but especially in aggressions and violences.
As martial artists of a more traditional and practice intent we can imagine our connectedness to the traditions that are derived from Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, where the "Gautama Buddha," taught his followers that luck does not exist, "all things which happen must have a cause, either material or spiritual, and do not occur due to luck, chance or fate."
If we allow luck into our mind, we give ourselves excuses such as, "Luck refers to that which happens to a person beyond that person's control, i.e., factors that are haphazardly brought on." It was beyond my control!
Another excuse that sounds sooo true is, “The naturalistic interpretation is that positive and negative events happen all the time in human lives, both due to random and non-random natural and artificial processes, and that even improbable events can happen by random chance. In this view, being "lucky" or "unlucky" is simply a descriptive label that points out an event's positivity, negativity, or improbability.”
The reason this sounds so acceptable, true and factual is that it explains luck as, “not luck.” Yes, there are positive and negative events in life and what makes them so is our preparation; yes, there are random and non-random events that happen both naturally and artificially where knowing the natural allows us to prepare and having knowledge of the artificial also allows preparation. Yes, even improbable events happen and yet if we were to accept that then we give excuse to what would be random vs. non-random therefore allowing the excuse we don’t need to prepare because it is out of our control. YES, luck and chance are simply descriptive labels that point to the event and that is simply a tool that allows us to learn lessons so we may prepare, prepare, prepare for any future events that are positive, negative or improbable allowing us to take control making them neither negative or positive or improbable but simply events that happen regardless.
I do agree with the saying, “Make your own luck!” I simply label it differently because we make our attitudes, our knowledge, our understanding and the synthesis of action and thought that drive how we handle things, we make that happen and take chance or luck out of the equation.
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