To Whom Fortune Favors
by Scott Wilson
The game-show-host-turned-president-of-the-United-States says that, “Everything in life is luck.”
Maybe the reason I’m not an elite athlete is that I don’t digest pain like they do, and never will because I wasn’t born with that gift. It’s tempting to say so at least. In my twenties I quit bike racing and re-appropriated my youthful devotion to academics because I couldn’t stand another broken bone or overworked ligament, and in the pursuit of knowledge and other intellectual delights the brain need not fight the body’s preservation instincts. It’s a hobby for me, torment, but when it consumes my life I prefer to leave it behind, and I think most people feel this way. Elite athletes seem to be glitches in the system, abnormalities who exist to inspire mortals like you and I in the way that ancient heroes did with peasants. But further analysis proves otherwise – Lance Armstrong became the greatest sports celebrity of a generation through his prowess at the Tour de France, then lost it all when the world found out he cheated. “Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.” So says existential philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, and while I want to trust his statement, Lance never went to jail, and settled the federal government’s one-hundred-million-dollar lawsuit against him for less than he’s spent watering the grounds of his mansion in Texas.
I’m more inclined to believe the president over the existentialist, though that implies an alternate definition,
Luck: noun; the opposite of justice.
The game-show-host-turned-president-of-the-United-States says that, “Everything in life is luck.”
Maybe the reason I’m not an elite athlete is that I don’t digest pain like they do, and never will because I wasn’t born with that gift. It’s tempting to say so at least. In my twenties I quit bike racing and re-appropriated my youthful devotion to academics because I couldn’t stand another broken bone or overworked ligament, and in the pursuit of knowledge and other intellectual delights the brain need not fight the body’s preservation instincts. It’s a hobby for me, torment, but when it consumes my life I prefer to leave it behind, and I think most people feel this way. Elite athletes seem to be glitches in the system, abnormalities who exist to inspire mortals like you and I in the way that ancient heroes did with peasants. But further analysis proves otherwise – Lance Armstrong became the greatest sports celebrity of a generation through his prowess at the Tour de France, then lost it all when the world found out he cheated. “Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.” So says existential philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, and while I want to trust his statement, Lance never went to jail, and settled the federal government’s one-hundred-million-dollar lawsuit against him for less than he’s spent watering the grounds of his mansion in Texas.
I’m more inclined to believe the president over the existentialist, though that implies an alternate definition,
Luck: noun; the opposite of justice.