How do you define “luck”? Personally, I don’t think it’s as straight forward as you might think.
You see, I think luck, and effort, in lots of ways are entwined.
If you bought one lottery ticket, and won £100,000, you’d probably consider that lucky, even though you went out and made the effort to buy the ticket and pick the numbers.
However, if you bought one hundred thousand lottery tickets, and won the same £100,000, how would you feel? Like you got your just reward? Like you were “evens”? Like your efforts have paid off, and you engineered that luck?
Maybe it’s not a great example, a lottery ticket, but the same applets to everything I think.
If your rubbish at football, but practice every day and, come the Saturday kick about with your mates you finally score a goal, would you think luck finally shines on you, would your friends think you got lucky?
Chance is a thing, of course it is, the same as chaos. Somethings happen in a random order, seemingly. Entropy, and the second law of thermodynamics is worth a read, if your interested; “a lack of order or predictability; a gradual decline into disorder.”
Sand dunes “suffer” from entropy, thanks to the winds, yet even that has a degree of predictability, even down to the basic knowledge that the wind will blow and the sand will move.
Anyway, this evening I had no clue what I was going to photograph. My head was still spinning from the working day, and at times like that I haven’t the clarity of mind to focus on what to photograph.
And so, I just grabbed my gear and walked out of the front door into the unknown. I turned right, crossed the road, walked up the street, still, oblivious to where I was going, then I turned left.
There, the sun was caught between trees and bushes either side, and the road underlined the whole scene, until it disappeared into the suns glow. A fence, gave extra subtle interest, and I’d found my inspiration.
How, I’ll let you decide. It might have been due to me going out every single day, without fail to find something, tipping the scales of probability in my favour. It might have been my eyes, drawn to the light subconsciously, even though until I rounded the last left turn I could not see the sun setting. It might have been luck, guiding me to the scene. It might have been a pure chance encounter, and on another evening I could have been walking for hours, looking for something yet finding nothing.
Who knows, but I think we have it within our hands to connect with all probabilities, and to make things happen.
Onegav 