This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Competition. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
Winning streaks, losing streaks: In some cases these are obvious effects of one’s actions. You overdraw your bank account every two weeks, as I did in my early 20s, and you’ll accumulate overdraft fees that eclipse a lot of your income. (An unhelpful period of time later, Wells Fargo was forced to return the money.)
Then there are the streaks that arise from unseen factors, the ones completely outside your control: the handlebars that snap off in your hands, the little kid that veers his oncoming scooter into your bike lane, the sand on the turnaround at the north end of the Santa Monica Bay bike path that flings your rear wheel out sideways like a Slip ’N Slide, slapping your whole weight and velocity onto your femur, which—unknowable, uncontrollable twist—is not as dense as it ought to be, and snaps in two.
They cross, the streaks of winning and losing. So for instance: the femur fracture came a month after I finally got health insurance, saving me $50,000 I didn’t have; the ensuing disability leave forced me, transformatively, to adopt a budget.
It is sometimes possible to look back on a given period of life and see that the weight of luck fell more to one side or another—that you won more often, or lost. I’m not an “everything happens for a reason” guy (or, I think you have to zoom out pretty far, and it can be hard from there to discern humanity), but I am amazed by how consistently and persuasively we supply retrospective meaning for the things we’ve lived through; and how everything that happens does indeed have causal force upon the things after it. Everything that happens is a reason for something.
Both in athletics and in creating, small sways of fortune redound; the more elite you get, in many sports, the slimmer the margins of victory. The very existence of a creative work can rest on a chance conversation, an overheard remark, a piece of a dream you struggle to recover and just barely do. The brutality of these things, what makes them so hard, is that in many cases you will benefit from good luck only if you’ve gotten yourself almost across the line already, which is the dividend of limitless practice. And when you do that, you are poised, just as much, for the pain of trying and failing to pull it off.
Over the doorway into my grandparents’ condo in Utah used to hang a horseshoe—classic summoner of good luck. Like all such objects, it witnessed some of the best luck its subjects would encounter and some of the worst. I think of all the luck we’ve lived through, those who passed under it; all the luck of others that we’ve made or broken. Being a point of departure, the doorway is a complement to the finish line where the athlete’s fortune resolves; if anything, the effects of luck there at the beginning compound more deeply than they do when they come at the end. But how from this vantage would you pick apart the good luck from the bad? They were always commingled. It wasn’t one shade of luck that the horseshoe conferred, but luck unalloyed, ready to become what life made of it. This is one of the ways in which our world is not a race: The result isn’t decided yet. The luck is uncalled.
Coming Friday: Heaven.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.