As Luck Would Have It
FORWARD: SOCIABILITY was an online magazine dedicated to “Living Generously and Serving Joyfully.”
An idea born during the throes of Covid, Sociability came to life through my friendship with Tony Rutigliano. With he as the Publisher and me as Executive Editor, TOGETHER WE launched Sociability as a different kind of online magazine. We recruited friends, friends of friends, and strangers who became friends to write stories about their lives and TO serve on our board. Everyone was a volunteer. It was a magazine full of ways that people are kind to one another. OUR CONTRIBUTORS AND i SHARED stories of fresh air and dogs, looking back and looking ahead, loving people just as they are (including yourself), sharing one’s talents and enthusiasm with others, dads spending time with daughters, moms supporting one another, and baking really good cake. FOR ME, THE EXPERIENCE OF WORKING WITH OUR CONTRIBUTORS WAS EXTRAORDINARY.
THE MAGAZINE existed from November 2020 - May 2022. We still see little glimmers of its impact today, which says to us that Sociability lived a good life. That’s about the best thing you can say about someone or something when you say good-bye.
hERE’S ONE OF MY STORIES, ORIGINALLY WRITTEN FOR SOCIABILITY AND NOW RETURNED TO ME TO SHARE WITH YOU.
Do you feel lucky? Well, do you?
Back in college, I knew a guy who’d say, “Find a penny, pick it up, and all day long you’ll have a penny.”
This used to drive me crazy, because every single time he’d utter it, he’d pause for laughter. The appreciative audience must have been in his head, because actual laughter was rarely a result. My typical response was a groan, a slightly-more-than-gentle punch to his shoulder, and a brilliant if not dated retort, like,
“Hilarious. Not.”
Inspired by St. Patrick’s Day and all things Irish, LUCK is the theme for our March 2021 issue of Sociability, and I’ve been thinking about that guy and his twisted idiom. The thing is, I don’t remember him for what he said but for the number of occasions he said it. How many pennies did he find during the four years I knew him? Three? Five? Ten? The truth is, that guy found a LOT of pennies, yet his perspective on finding them never changed. No delight. No gratitude. No wonder. At the rate he was going he would have found hundreds of cents over his lifetime and never once noticed.
Thus, we begin to unpack the idea of “being lucky”: noticing the good stuff that already happens to us. In the book The Luck Factor, author Richard Wiseman addresses four main habits of lucky people, and the first is to “be open to more opportunities.” In the case of Wiseman’s research, people were given a journal by a researcher and told to write down everything lucky that happens to them. Simply by paying attention, subjects start interpreting more things that go their way as being “lucky.”
But were the subjects actually luckier, or did they just feel luckier? What if they had been asked to write down every conspiracy that happens to them? Or curse? Or blessing? Or miracle? In this way, you do make your own reality. If you look for luck, it’s there. So are conspiracies, curses, blessings, or miracles.
I say, let’s all look for the good stuff.