Hans had completed seven long years of work for his Master who rewarded him with a great lump of gold. The gold was very heavy and Hans was soon utterly worn out from carrying it. A man passed on his horse and asked what the trouble was, kindly offering to swop his horse for the gold so Hans could ride along. Hans was well pleased though when he mounted up the horse bolted and threw him down. A lady with a cow passed and helped him up, generously relieving Hans of the troublesome horse for the amazing cow which would supply him with milk and cheese for all eternity, though when he tried to milk her she kicked him in the head.
A most benevolent man gave his pig for the horrible cow and now he had more bacon than he could imagine, though more fear too since it seemed that the pig was stolen and so he quietly swopped it with a very helpful man for his plump goose. Having said that, all these fortunate events gave him no coin in his pocket and so he swopped the goose with a knife grinder for a grinding stone that was only a little damaged. It would be a great living but it was pretty heavy and so when it accidentally fell in the well when he went there to drink it seemed he was now entirely free and so he went happily on his way.
A cynical view of Hans might be that he is the classic ‘puer aeternus’ who doesn’t understand how the world works and yet each one of his exchanges are right for him at the time. His luck seems to be that he accepts misfortune when it happens and refrains from having to dress it up or blame himself. Fair trade depends on your perspective as well as market forces. Because he can hold onto this, let himself feel burdened, bucked, kicked, accused and penniless, all manner of what looks like misfortune becomes something else.
I was on my way to an exciting and long awaited meeting. The sun was out, my new motorbike rumbled effortlessly down the highway. Everything was perfect. Suddenly, the bike begins to splutter, intermittent cutting out, then loss of power and an emergency search for a safe spot to pull over. I let the bike cool down before trying again. Nothing. I wrack my brains trying to figure it out. I’d changed the battery the day before, was there a loose terminal? A hairy bloke on a Silver Wing stops and waggles the cables, ‘yeah, look, a loose terminal’ He regaled me with stories of his own roadside mishaps while we waited for the RAC. I felt better. I was going to make it even if I had been the author of my own bad luck.
One offer of help comes after another. An old boy on a massive BMW stops and prefers a tiny clasp knife to see if that might help. I dig at the terminals with the one inch blade to honour his gesture. Gimley’s big brother turns up in a van, red beard to his belt, ‘I got cokes if you need.’ A Hell’s Angel on a chopped Harley with nitrous canister out front and skull engraved into the tank pulls up, confirming the consensus of opinion and we tell tales until the RAC show up.
The RAC guy really wants to help, wishes it was just a loose wire but it’s not the battery. It’s the alternator. Very expensive. Also, the bike is dead in the water. The policy I took out that morning didn’t cover having to be towed. That would be extra, a lot extra. Oh, and more time. Another hour, then two and then three. Night fell.
Yet I felt strangely buoyant. It wasn’t my fault. Alternators corrode and burn out especially when you live by the sea. My California Vintage was by definition an old lady and prone to senior moments. Shit happens. Its not your fault and maybe even the other stuff that you think is your fault, is not your fault. What if it had been the battery connection? Replacing the battery on a machine that’s new to you is like a squirrel tackling a nut for the first time. You make mistakes. Maybe it doesn’t work first time. This is how we learn. Without trial and error you cannot move forward. You make mistakes, the same old ones and if you are lucky new ones in glorious technicolour. If error becomes blameworthy fault or responsibility heaped where it does not belong then learning stops, branches droop and the tree withers.
Blame gets inside you easily and threatens quality of life. What very often contributes to trauma is the conviction that you deserve what befell you, rehashing what the East has to teach us about karma back into a more Judeo Christian interpretation. We tend to embrace self blame, as pernicious as it is, because it is in fact a form of paradoxical self defence. Fordham reminds us that self blame makes a person party to events and therefore a significant player, mitigating against feelings of inferiority and helplessness. Kids blame themselves for parental woes, for the abuses suffered as a result, blows of fate you must omnipotently ‘deserve’ to keep from being a mere pawn on the board.
Gaslighting yourself makes the thing that happened and your feelings about it difficult to lay to rest. The problem with this is that happiness and things that happen go together. The two words ‘happiness’ and ‘happen’ have the same etymological root, Old English ‘eadig‘, wealth, riches, luck. When certain happenings aren’t allowed to be what they are, random undeserved blows, then happiness also suffers because now you are not only to blame but also unlucky.
How would it be to think of what is happening around you as having absolutely nothing to do with you? Paradoxically, it allowed me to watch the evening settle, to count my blessings for the hard shoulder I had to get off the highway, the Costa coffee house across the way, street light, folks slowing to see if I was okay, stopping to talk. So when Jung says, ‘what happens to a person has something to do with them’, he suggests that what we think of as ‘happening’ is not simply about events themselves but about how we are conditioned to interpret them; not just what they mean but what they have to mean.
The recovery guy is a young Russian bloke, interspersing chaotic efforts to load up the bike with frantic phone calls from his mate whose own recovery vehicle is stuck in a ditch somewhere with its back wheels in the air. Somehow he begins to talk about luck and whether he believes in such a thing. He didn’t like the idea because it implied forces greater than himself and he wanted to believe he was captain of his own ship. Things happened because of things which went before. He was in control… though he did have anxiety attacks… and it had taken him many a sweaty palmed year to get his licence.
‘Perhaps’, he mused, ‘luck happens when you experience yourself as lucky. Its not so much the shape of the journey but what you do with what life presents you.. though,’ he added reluctantly, ‘the Universe responds to expectation…’ Does fortune not favour the brave? He slowed right down as he realised the conundrum with which this now faced him, the corner into which he had just talked himself. ‘So, if I am to be lucky then I must renounce the desire to be in control and not mind what happens….’
