Lots of Luck

Fortune. Good luck or bad. Real or perceived?

I've never seen a lottery winner, during an interview, pleading WHY?" But when a tornado blows through town, everyone's looking for answers.

It's human nature, I suppose - this need to make sense of whatever scares us, hurts us, cheats us. They call it "closure." The peace is in the knowing, apparently. And I suppose it can help. But for me, the real closure is accepting that, sometimes, it just is what it is. Random, awful, wonderful, glorious things can, and do, happen for no reason. Trying to sort it all out comes from a need for control. That's what makes no sense, if you ask me. Let me give you a perfect example:

It was early afternoon, on October 29, 2012. You may not remember the date, but I assure you, you remember the storm: Hurricane Sandy (or Frankenstorm, or Superstorm, or whatever you want to call it). While the rest of us were battening down the hatches, securing patio furniture, and getting in one last walk of the dog...my neighbor ("Jorge") was in his driveway using his leaf blower. Huh?

I though to myself, "Helloooo? Hurricane a comin'!" "He's daft," I said to my friend, Donato. "Crazy!"

Donato, a psychologist, had a more eloquent explanation: when fear strikes (or anxiety or uncertainty), some people act out by trying to control their environment.

How do you control a hurricane? You don't. With winds up to 115 mph, and 233 fatalities, it's pretty clear that some things happen for no reason at all and there's not a damn thing you can do about them. And they'll never make sense.

And just in case you had any doubt, that leaf blowing turned out to be a fool's errand, indeed. Trees fell all over our neighborhood. One of them landed smack in the middle of Jorge's driveway.