What is the truest bit of overused conventional wisdom? I mean "sayings" such as "look before you leap" or "he who hesitates is lost." Either of these might pretty often be good advice but it seems obvious that neither has a claim to qualifying as a universal principle. The adherents of one keep the divorce rate high, while adherents of the other multiply the numbers of fretting mothers of thirty-somethings. When one is good advice, the other is bad. I'm looking for triteness that's always true, or at least possesses explanatory power across a range of situations.
My leading candidate is, "Better to be lucky than good." I thought of it the other day when, having backed the car down the drive, I remembered that we have a 9-year-old and a 6-year-old and the next door neighbor has a 5-year-old and a 2-year-old. Being less than fully attentive under these circumstances did not make it into any stone tablet inscribed on a mountaintop but clearly it could cause death. You hear about it happening in the news at least once a summer it seems. The "guilty" driver likely wasn't any more careless than I had just been. You might feel entitled to the modest degree of luck necessary to avoid such a catastrophe but some people weren't granted it.
Also, when you listen to people brag, and try to "unwrap" it, my fairly consistent conclusion is that they're crowing about their good luck. The treasury secretary's wife with the social media post hashtagging all the designer brands she was wearing on her "day trip" to Kentucky--she isn't better than the woman in Oregon with whom she got into a spat. She's prettier, which is probably what attracted Steve Mnuchin, and being pretty is a matter of luck. Mnuchin is smart enough to have figured out how to make millions from the mortgage meltdown of the last decade. Being smart is lucky, too. That these two should have married isn't a shock. People who have enjoyed good luck do not usually marry people who have had a lot of bad luck.
Mnuchin & wife are a gift from the God who made it pleasurable to hate. Acknowledging the high place of luck in life can have a deflating effect, too. In her essay "Citizen Updike," Elizabeth Hardwick, taking the measure of her subject's prodigious output, and noting the seemingly effortless "long flow of attention and feeling" that recommends the Rabbit Angstrom novels, declares the author to be among "Augustine's 'fair' and 'fit.'" She's saying he had the good luck to receive such a gift. Yes, he "worked hard," but lots of people work hard without getting anywhere. It must be relatively easy to stay hard at it when the results are so glittering.
Look very closely into any great success and you are apt to discover that it's built upon a foundation of what might plausibly be called good luck.
And then there is bad luck. In the sentencing phase of a capital trial, the defense is given the opportunity to place in evidence "extenuating circumstances" that might have the effect of mitigating guilt. "Extenuating circumstances" is a polysyllabic expression meaning "bad luck." For example, surveys indicate that the part of the male prison population that has suffered a traumatic brain injury is in the range of 50 to 80 percent, compared to less than 10 percent of the general population. It's bad luck to have been injured in this way. Since a brain injury is just one category of bad luck, we could probably not afford to have a sentencing phase for such everyday crimes as assault, larceny, and criminal sexual misconduct. There aren't enough judges to hear all the "sob stories" arising from the fact that people, before they are born, aren't asked to fill out a questionnaire in which they indicate what traits they would like for their parents to have.
One of Errol Morris's many great movies is The Thin Blue Line, about a Texas drifter who was wrongly convicted of killing a cop. It's somewhat satisfying to watch as the movie, unlike the justice system, succeeds at placing guilt upon the correct person, a juvenile offender who had hooked up with the drifter to watch a soft-core film at a drive-in in the hours before the shooting. The drifter is interviewed on camera in several sequences, and he's a rather engaging fellow, which adds to the satisfaction one feels as the movie proves he didn't really do it. Then, when it's pretty well settled who did it, the real killer, now an adult incarcerated for a different offense, is interviewed on camera and gives an eerily casual account of why he thinks his life went bad. When he was very young, he had been playing with his toddler brother in one of those little plastic kiddie pools. Their father left the boys unattended for a brief period, and the younger one drowned. The father, probably unable to cope with his own guilt, perpetuated a family myth concerning how the surviving boy had allowed his little brother to drown. Really bad luck, as bad or worse than a physical brain injury.
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