Fortune favours the brazen
May. 26th, 2008 09:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mhuzzellAs you've probably gathered from the anxious splurge of the last 3 entries, it's exam time here in St Andrews. It's the ultimate time of both stress and excess. After their exams, students indulge in wearied but earnest celebrations, and pass the days between finishing and leaving town with varied activities of fantastic and inspired purposeful meaninglessness. But until then, each lives in a personal hell. The more serious students work even more diligently than usual; the rest suddenly remember that they care about their degrees and work day and night to make up a semester's worth of neglected studies; all become academic zombies, slouching around the town in an unkempt drift, eyes permanently unfocused, minds occupied with an even mix of potential exam material and panic about not knowing enough potential exam material. I heard one girl got hit by a car outside the library. Bad luck, I guess; tragedy -- though the same rumour said that she is okay, she just broke her leg or something.
Meanwhile, "Good luck!" is the phrase on everyone's lips. Everyone's. For everything, even those things to which luck would not ordinarily apply. It may be that everyone is simply so stressed with exams that they can't come up with an alternative parting declaration, or maybe it's just that it's become so common that it seems applicable to any situation. Either way, it has very nearly replaced 'goodbye'. Of course, given that 'goodbye', I am told, is short for 'God be with you', I'm not sure there's really much difference.
Sure, Atheism hasn't entirely taken hold, but ours is nevertheless an essentially secular society. Yet we hold on to our superstitions. I suspect it comes from our desire to understand our world. That sounds trite, I know, but it's true. We're good at spotting patterns, we humans, and we instinctively look for explanations. This helps us; we like to shape the world around us, "control our own destinies" as much as we can. But we are intensely, subtly desperately aware of the many things we simply cannot control. Hence, I think, the elaborate rituals we construct around such things.
And so we offer each other wishes of "good luck" as we pray to our rabbit's feet and four-leaf clovers. It kind of makes sense for an exam, which more than any other form of assessment is usually a matter of luck, unless you happen to know every single area covered in the course in intimate detail. But wishing people "good luck" in studying for an exam? Is it 'good luck' keeping focused, working efficiently? Or is it a more pre-emptive sort of wish, 'may you have the good luck to be studying the things that will appear on your exam paper'? I have a friend who, when offered 'good luck' while writing an essay, would sneer that 'luck has nothing to do with it!' Which is mostly true, I guess -- the crafting of an essay is entirely within the control of the writer. But there are attendant fate-dependent areas: finding appropriate research material, or warding off any number of potential distractions or electronic failures.
I find that when I start to generalise luck even a little bit, it becomes omnipresent, insidious -- but also almost meaningless. That girl who got hit by a car: was she 'unlucky' to be hit, or 'lucky' to survive it? I suppose it could be both. That would only render it meaningless in ways of speaking by which a person has set quotas of 'good luck' and 'bad luck' dictating their fortunes -- yet this seems to be the general way of speaking, or at least the subtext of the general way. What is this 'luck', anyway, and what is it doing in our lives? Is it all a matter of perceptions? Do we psych ourselves out, for good or bad? Yet there are certainly some things that just seem arbitrarily unfortunate. But, again, could this simply be a matter of our perceptions of them? I've been puzzling over this for months now, maybe years, and I'm no closer to a conclusion. Perhaps you can figure it out? Good luck.
Meanwhile, "Good luck!" is the phrase on everyone's lips. Everyone's. For everything, even those things to which luck would not ordinarily apply. It may be that everyone is simply so stressed with exams that they can't come up with an alternative parting declaration, or maybe it's just that it's become so common that it seems applicable to any situation. Either way, it has very nearly replaced 'goodbye'. Of course, given that 'goodbye', I am told, is short for 'God be with you', I'm not sure there's really much difference.
Sure, Atheism hasn't entirely taken hold, but ours is nevertheless an essentially secular society. Yet we hold on to our superstitions. I suspect it comes from our desire to understand our world. That sounds trite, I know, but it's true. We're good at spotting patterns, we humans, and we instinctively look for explanations. This helps us; we like to shape the world around us, "control our own destinies" as much as we can. But we are intensely, subtly desperately aware of the many things we simply cannot control. Hence, I think, the elaborate rituals we construct around such things.
And so we offer each other wishes of "good luck" as we pray to our rabbit's feet and four-leaf clovers. It kind of makes sense for an exam, which more than any other form of assessment is usually a matter of luck, unless you happen to know every single area covered in the course in intimate detail. But wishing people "good luck" in studying for an exam? Is it 'good luck' keeping focused, working efficiently? Or is it a more pre-emptive sort of wish, 'may you have the good luck to be studying the things that will appear on your exam paper'? I have a friend who, when offered 'good luck' while writing an essay, would sneer that 'luck has nothing to do with it!' Which is mostly true, I guess -- the crafting of an essay is entirely within the control of the writer. But there are attendant fate-dependent areas: finding appropriate research material, or warding off any number of potential distractions or electronic failures.
I find that when I start to generalise luck even a little bit, it becomes omnipresent, insidious -- but also almost meaningless. That girl who got hit by a car: was she 'unlucky' to be hit, or 'lucky' to survive it? I suppose it could be both. That would only render it meaningless in ways of speaking by which a person has set quotas of 'good luck' and 'bad luck' dictating their fortunes -- yet this seems to be the general way of speaking, or at least the subtext of the general way. What is this 'luck', anyway, and what is it doing in our lives? Is it all a matter of perceptions? Do we psych ourselves out, for good or bad? Yet there are certainly some things that just seem arbitrarily unfortunate. But, again, could this simply be a matter of our perceptions of them? I've been puzzling over this for months now, maybe years, and I'm no closer to a conclusion. Perhaps you can figure it out? Good luck.
