Rethinking Bad Luck
In Estelle Frankel’s The Wisdom of Not Knowing: Discovering a Life of Wonder by Embracing Uncertainty, she tells a folktale you’ve likely heard before:
A peasant had a beautiful white horse. One night the horse ran away. When the neighbors learn of his misfortune, they come to offer their sympathy saying, ‘We are so sorry for your bad luck.’ They are surprised by their neighbor’s response when he says,‘Could be bad luck; could also be good luck. You never know.” The next day the peasant’s horse returns together with a beautiful stallion. The neighbors come to congratulate him, saying: “You are so lucky. Not only has your horse returned, you now have two beautiful horses.” Again the peasant’s reply baffles them when he says: “Could be good luck; could also be bad luck. You never know.” The next day the peasant’s son is thrown off one of the horses while riding and he breaks his leg. The neighbors again come to comfort the peasant, saying: “We are so sorry to hear of your son’s bad luck.” Again, the peasant replies: “Could be bad luck; could also be good luck. You never know.” The next day officials from the government come to the village to conscript every able-bodied young man to go fight in a senseless war. All the young men of the village are taken except for the peasant’s son, who could not serve in the army with a broken leg. In the end he is the only young man in the village to survive the war—all because of his bad-good luck.
I promise I’m not drawn to this story because it’s about someone who falls off a horse and breaks something significant. I had actually just read this same folktale (I believe in one of Rabbi Leder’s books) when I came across Frankel’s retelling, which made me feel like there’s definitely something in here that I’m supposed to heed. And so I’ve been meditating on it for weeks, turning over this concept of luck and how quick we are to apprise it without any context of time. As this story conveys, who is to say whether something is good or bad in the moment—even when something seems truly terrible.
In one of my earliest conversations with my dear friend, the incredible Intuitive/Medium Laura Lynne Jackson (author of two of my favorite books: The Light Between Us and Signs), she told me how our teams of light on the other side can interfere in remarkable ways to protect us, even if it feels like unwanted interference. (Speaking of broken legs, at a dinner once, LLJ told another friend that she had broken her foot to save her from a worse fate.) Just because we don’t get what we want in a moment—or get something we very much don’t want—doesn’t mean that either outcome isn’t for our highest good. We are all playing something of a long-game.
As Frankel writes, “Like the neighbors in this tale, we tend to judge and label all our experiences in life as good or bad, desirable or undesirable. This is a manifestation of our fixation on duality. Most of us have a running commentary going on in our brains that either approves or disapproves of everything we experience. When things do not match our idea of how they should be, we often feel distress. We are rarely willing to just take life as it comes and wait and see what happens. But, as the story suggests, good and bad are not absolute categories, nor are they readily predictable. Nondual consciousness takes us beyond these absolutes. Light can emerge from darkness, and good can come out of seemingly bad luck. A dark night of the soul may open us up to a realm of light and unforeseen possibilities; the unfortunate things that happen in our lives may conceal great luck.” (p. 72-73)
Clearly, we live in a society that is somewhat fixated on a growth curve that is up-and-to-the right—everything must be constantly improving and getting bigger, more, more, more. But as I’ve come to understand, we all need dark nights of the soul: Growth requires death. (Just as a garden requires compost.) Death of ideas, relationships, jobs, identities, wants and desires, and sometimes even people. It’s not necessarily what we want, but sometimes it is what we need in order to push us into a process of resurrection, where we have to get down on our knees until we learn to stand again.
Frankel also surfaced one of my favorite Mary Oliver poems, A Box Full of Darkness:
Someone I once loved gave me
A box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
That this, too, was a gift.
May we learn to take each thing as it comes, without judgment, but instead as an opportunity to find the lesson—or more importantly, let the lesson unfold, over time.