This is reminiscent of the Alan Watts parable of the Chinese Farmer (probably adapted from a Chinese parable):<p>Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. That evening, all of his neighbors came around to commiserate. They said, “We are so sorry to hear your horse has run away. This is most unfortunate.” The farmer said, “Maybe.” The next day the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and in the evening everybody came back and said, “Oh, isn’t that lucky. What a great turn of events. You now have eight horses!” The farmer again said, “Maybe.”<p>The following day his son tried to break one of the horses, and while riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg. The neighbors then said, “Oh dear, that’s too bad,” and the farmer responded, “Maybe.” The next day the conscription officers came around to conscript people into the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. Again all the neighbors came around and said, “Isn’t that great!” Again, he said, “Maybe.”
This relates to something I’ve thought a lot about, which is how to have a healthy relationship with regret. I think it’s easy to get caught up in the kind of reasoning the author gives here and to end up feeling like regret is a fundamentally pointless thing. After all, if I go back ten years in a time machine and fix that mistake, I’m not only completely “re-rolling” every good thing in my life after that point, but I’m also replacing every child born in the last nine years or so with different people. What am I, history’s greatest monster?<p>Which is why useful regret is forward-looking. It makes no sense to entertain a regret like “if only I’d left the house one second earlier,” because there’s no systematic connection between leaving the house slightly sooner and not getting hit by a car. It really is just wishing you could redo a specific dice roll. There’s no actual lesson.<p>But a regret like “if only I’d noticed the warning signs” is different. That’s a functional, forward-looking regret which you can learn from. You don’t have to want to get in a time machine and redo your life from that point, and you can acknowledge that you simply didn’t have the experience needed to make the right decision at the time. But the feeling of regret can still help you to internalize the systematic relationship between that decision and its outcome.
The author was hit by a motorist. As a road cyclist, I ride predictably, visibly, and legally. Yet every close call or collision has been due to motorist impatience, inattention, and/or lawlessness. By over-emphasizing the "luck" factor and using the narrative of some inanimate force of nature "a car" causing the harm, we continue to fail to hold those directly causing the problem responsible.
I’ve tended toward this viewpoint myself as I’ve grown older. Just this week, our AC went out for 3 days (I live in Phoenix), and I got a pretty nasty head cold at the same time. My past self would’ve been so bitchy and moany about the situation, but my current me was more “what can ya do?” I did what I could to try to keep my family as comfortable as possible and we got through it. Turned out to be a pretty incredible week by the end of it.<p>Side note: I truly do not mean to be flippant or victim blaming in any way, but honestly, OP, how did you get hit by a car? I’ve never even come close to getting hit by one, and I’ve changed tires on a freeway during rush hour. I mean to receive a genuine explanation here, because my children are young and I want to teach them how to be safe around roads. (I’m assuming this was a pedestrian-vehicle incident because the article is light on details)
I think everyone is missing the point so far.<p>The author is saying that everything in their life is shaped by the events they have experienced up to this point. It doesn't matter whether or not the individual event was good or bad at the time, because we ultimately can't know what impact it will have on our future.
That's actually a subplot in Office Space (spoiler alert):
<a href="https://f.clip.cafe/videos/just-remember-you-hang-in-there-long-enough.mp4" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://f.clip.cafe/videos/just-remember-you-hang-in-there-l...</a>
I think the point is that part of luck is made of just attitude. "Lucky people" may be even able to transform their bad luck into good fortune.<p>You go to the bank, there is a heist. Somebody get shot in his left arm. The unlucky will think: "Why so much bad luck? Went to the bank and got shot!", lucky people will think: "Just a few more inches and I was dead! How lucky am I?".<p>Perhaps unlucky people tend to concentrate on the negative aspects of the events and think about how the outcome could have been better. Lucky people tend to see the more positive side of things and reflect upon how the outcome could have been much worse.
So is it perspective or chemical imbalance?<p>I mean your partner could be leaving you because you can't go to the bathroom by yourself because you are permanently disabled for the rest of your life? You'd live to 90 but unable to move by yourself?<p>So yeah I guess you could have a brain chemical imbalance that tells you pain is lucky because it could be worse or permanent and you might get away with it being temporary?<p>Somewhere between overly positive and depression is the right balance.
I got hit by a car when i was a kid (as a pedestrian), and I have pondered the exact same things before. It was bad luck that I got hit, but was it good luck that the injury caused a coma, which helped my brain protect itself? Very quickly the good/bad binary becomes nonsense.
This reminds me of the quote from Star Trek, “There are many parts of my youth that I'm not proud of. There were -- loose threads; untidy parts of me that I would like to remove. But when I pulled on one of those threads, it unraveled the tapestry of my life.”
In the realm of chance and happenstance,<p>A collision occurs - a twist of fate's dance,<p>But let us embrace the hand we've been dealt,<p>With gratitude and contentment deeply felt.