The Power of Luck

As I talked about in my last blog post, I am now working in Edmonton. With no real base of support for me to rely on (a huge number of family and friends were back in Vancouver), I got quite homesick and even a bit lethargic. After 3 weeks on the job, I was on msn at night and my mom asked if I wanted to go home for the May long weekend.

I gave it very little thought and almost immediately said yes. Yes, I did want to go back home. I remember likening my return to home to a cellphone. You can take the cellphone everywhere but eventually, the cellphone needs to get recharged. And that's exactly what I needed, to recharge, to reconnect to my base of support. It wasn't that work was burning me out - on the contrary, it was not really that bad lately. It was mostly the fact that while other coworkers all had family or established lives to come home to, I had no-one. I'm usually a fairly independent person but even so, it was hard not to let that fact affect me.

In any case, I booked the flight and had planned to leave my apartment around 7ish for the shuttle to take me to the airport. My flight was at 9 and I figured it would take about an hour to get there from downtown so I thought that leaving at 7 would be a safe bet.

Once I got home from work, I wasted a lot of time doing lots of random things on my computer: reading rss feeds, posting on twitter and redux and even playing the random online game on the internet. As it started to near 7, I packed and made sure I had everything I needed for the weekend at home. Finally, I packed up everything and started to make my way to the front of a nearby hotel where the shuttle would pick me up to take me to the airport. As I left my building, I immediately realized I did not bring the power cable for my laptop and had to make a quick decision - did I absolutely need the power cable for the weekend?

Yes, I did. And that's when I frantically ran back up to grab the power cable. By this time, a few precious minutes had passed and when I reached the front of the hotel, a bus boy greeted me. I asked him whether the shuttle had passed by already and he said that it had just passed by a few minutes ago. I then asked when the next shuttle would be (the shuttle comes around every 20 minutes so it wasn't too big of a deal if I got there at 8:20) and that's when he said a quarter past 8.

8:15!?!?!? At this point, I checked my cellphone and realized that my laptop time had been on Vancouver time all this time. When I saw it reach 7 pm, it was actually 8 pm Edmonton time. With my flight leaving at 9, I had to take a taxi and bust it over there. I passed by a taxi on the way to the hotel so I ran back to the taxi I passed, got in and told the driver to book it to the airport.

We sped through downtown then sped through one major road that links to the highway to the airport. Along this major road, we were extremely lucky -- at one point, the taxi driver slows down to the point where I'm almost thrown to the front. We had been speeding through this 4 lane freeway in the 4th lane and my taxi driver spotted a police cop gunning people down for speeding. Of course, we were lucky because he had only been looking at the lanes closest to him and we were in the lane farthest away from him but it would have been a serious setback if we had been stopped at that point.

Unbelievably, we reached the airport in 25 minutes which my coworkers later tell me is amazingly fast. I check in, get through the security gates and then as I am boarding the plane, I finally breathe a sigh of relief.

That whole experience really got me thinking about the power of luck. I know it was lucky that the taxi didn't get caught by the police for speeding but was it lucky that I forgot my power cable and thus was late for the sky shuttle? If I had got on that sky shuttle thinking it was 7, I am pretty sure I would have missed my flight. And it got me thinking about a movie I had watched in the past -- Matchpoint. If you haven't watched it, I would suggest giving it a shot. It explores that very notion of luck and its effect on life. What is the effect of luck in your life? What does it mean to be in the right place at the right time? How often can we attribute luck to finding that special someone? Or finding the right job?

I have heard many people claim that they themselves are unlucky and while there is some merit of truth, luck balances out at some point. Being lucky isn't just about sitting around and waiting for something to happen. It's about putting yourself into situations where luck can come your way.