I believe in bad luck. Today I want to show you another attitude toward troubles that were not caused by our “choice”. I want to describe my way to a more positive life style.
I was fourteen years old when one event and its outcome, changed my way of thinking,. It was an ordinary day, quite warm for a Siberian autumn. Who knew that after that day I would stay in a hospital bed for three months without the ability to turn myself on another side.
During our physical education class, we were supposed to climb on a rope. However I fell down from the rope to the mat below. The day before my accident a new rope was delivered to our school, although it was a bit longer than it was supposed to be. No one took care to cut it, but they made a knot and hided it under one of the mats. By wish of bad fortune, I fell down exactly on this knot, which was ideally suited to the center of my back, right between 10th and 12th vertebras. A Broken spine is not one of the things that you want to wish to anyone, but it happened to me.
Laying in the hospital and looking to the ceiling I had enough time to think over my life. Also, I had time to count more than 19 thousand dots on the ceiling, but this is not part of my story. I realized that in our life there is not so much place for prediction. I can be sure that a pen will fell down on a floor, if I drop it, because it is a law of nature. A bit less, but I can be sure about results of actions that depends on me. However, there is a human factor, actions and decisions of other people, that could change our whole life.
So, laying on my back during more than three months, I realized that people have nothing to do with bad luck, occasional circumstances and wish to scratch their backs. What is bad luck? Benjamin Franklin once said: ”I am a strong believer in luck and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.” In this case, missed opportunities are not bad luck, it is my careless. Moreover, even money that I lost in Las-Vegas is not bad luck, as it is my choice to take a risk with my money. Everything that depends on me and my choice has nothing to do with luck. But stormy weather outside and circumstances caused by other people, as a knot under mat, is bad luck. I decided to believe that there are events that I cannot influence.
It is sad, isn’t it? However, this belief brought me to a choice, that, as well as my family and friends, was supporting me during hard time of physical rehabilitation and retrieval to normal pupil’s life. In hospital, I faced two choices: to be depressed by the fact of bad luck or take it easy, and move forward doing my best with everything that depends on me to make my life better for now and the nearest future. What have I chosen? You can guess by my happy smile.