Does Luck Exist? Sometimes people get hit with bad luck. The bad luck could continue for quite some time. I have had bouts of it myself. I owned a gray Honda years ago. This was before they installed the extra light in the back. This car was hit four different times with me in it. Three of those times I was either stopped at a light or stopped behind a school bus. The fourth time, I was on a county paved two-way road with a hill in front of me. I wasn’t going very fast but a car, a Pontiac Firebird Trans Am came flying over the hill in my lane and sort of twisted in the air, yes its wheels were off the ground because it was going so fast it launched over the hill, and hit my tiny Honda in the side and carried it a long way before we stopped. The driver’s side was pushed in and the arm rest stopped just as it touched my side. If it wasn’t for the fact the Honda was so light and the Trans Am had such a low front, I probably would not be here today. I decided to get rid of that unlucky car, which by the way still ran after the accident. Before that car I didn’t believe in luck and objects being unlucky, but with that Honda I said enough was enough. Maybe I should have looked at things a different way, after all I was never hurt in the four accidents so maybe that was a lucky car and I should have kept it? Sometimes we perceive things as unlucky, but many times they have a flip side and we don’t notice it at the time. Does thinking luck exists mean it does? Sometimes people blame luck for things when it was not bad luck at all, but dare I say stupidity. I am thinking about a man who jumped off the Eifel Tower in a primitive flying suit he made, before there was such a thing. When he jumped, he didn’t glide like he thought he would, but fell like a rock. It was all very sad and an early movie camera filmed it. Some would say this was bad luck, but was it really? It was more like a bad choice to test the suit this way. Maybe he could have attached a rope to a manned balloon so if it didn’t work, he could be pulled up. Maybe he could have used a dummy for this test. Anyway, as I said this type of thing doesn’t seem like bad luck to me. Is there a tie in to curses and bad luck? If you ask someone if they believe in curses, they most always say no, and yet some of these same people get very upset if a black cat crosses their path or if someone does curse them, especially if that person looks strange. Take the curse on King Tut’s tomb and what happened to those that discovered it. Lord Carnarvon who financed part of the venture died within a year. Many others who had a connection to finding and opening the tomb seemed to suffer untimely deaths. It has been said a mold was in the tomb which was responsible for some deaths as was a mosquito bite. If there was a curse how come Howard Carter the man who found the tomb in 1922, lived until 1939 so one could hardly say he died from the curse and he was even the one who removed the body. People like to try and link things for dramatic effect even when there really is no connection at all sometimes. It is hard to explain how one person can play a large lottery for his or her entire life and never win a big price and another can play and within a couple of years win a huge prize two or three times. One lottery player won incredible jackpots four times. It is hard to dispute in this case that luck doesn’t exist because it sure looks like she has it. Joan Ginther won a 5.4-million-dollar lottery prize in 1993. She then won a 2.6-million-dollar prize in 2006. In 2008 she won 3 million and in 2010 won 10 million dollars. According to the odds this is in a practical sense impossible, but there you are. There was a guy who claimed he had figured out how to win the lottery. In 1992, Stefan Mandel won a 27-million-dollar jackpot in a lottery in Virginia. He had bought ever single combination of numbers. He said he knew he had to win and made a tidy profit. Of course, this had nothing to do with luck even if we believe in it and this guy had won the lottery 14 times. Using his system in Australia he won 12 times, but then the Australians passed laws to prevent playing this way. When he got to Virginia notice if you bought every combination of numbers in the lottery it would cost 7.1 million dollars, so he figured he would wait until the jackpot was 25 million and then enter. There are also the occasions where something so fantastic happens yet someone survives that one might attribute it either to the intervention of God or sheer good luck. I can’t help but think about the World War 2 member of a bomber crew flying over enemy territory. His bomber was hit and as the injured plane tried to make it back to base, it became a fireball. The chutes were all on fire and the crew members had to make a choice either stay on the plane and burn to death or jump out without a chute and die. He decided burning was worse so he jumped out of the plane which was thousands of feet high. As the ground approached the man went into the form one would use if he had a chute. He hit the ground and rolled. He broke both ankles but somehow survived. If you believe in luck, he had to be the luckiest man alive, but I believe God had something to do with this. When we talk about luck there is actually no such thing. We can’t touch it, smell it or even see it, and yet we ascribe some things to it, as if it was some kind of force. You never hear anyone say I saw some luck and went for it. Some people though have tried to buy luck by purchasing what they thought were lucky objects, because someone who had the object before had something good happen to them. They obtained what they might believed was a talisman. For example, thousands or more four-leaf clover keychains are sold every month.
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