Geography at birth

For a while now, I have been blogging about the (mis)fortunes that come our way just because of our parents.  Who we are born to makes a huge difference in life.  Every time I blog along those lines, the frequent (and now the only) commenter, and others have disagreed with me.  (Check this out, or this, for instance.)

I have also blogged in plenty about luck. Dumb luck.

Thus, I have never really cared much for people bragging about how they made it all by themselves.  Not that he brags, but consider Bill Gates.  It is not as if he created his fortunes after growing up in the projects.  I was not born a Dalit and my father was not a manual scavenger.  The truly rags to riches, rising from the utterly disadvantaged, is a rare exception.  Most of us have only built upon the accident of birth.

To quite some extent, the cosmic dice rolled in our favor, which is why you and I are interacting here.

I started thinking as a social scientist on the role of circumstance and luck in how lives turn out. It's a sobering experience to realize just how many variables are out of our control

Yep.  That's what I have been saying for a long, long time.

What about intelligence and hard work? Surely they matter as much as luck. Yes, but decades of data from behavior genetics tell us that at least half of intelligence is heritable, as is having a personality high in openness to experience, conscientiousness and the need for achievement—all factors that help to shape success. The nongenetic components of aptitude, scrupulousness and ambition matter, too, of course, but most of those environmental and cultural variables were provided by others or circumstances not of your making.

Choosing your parents well has given you one hell of an advantage, dear reader!

Michael Shermer wraps up his column--his 200th for the Scientific American--with this:

There should be consolation in the fact that studies show that what is important in the long run is not success so much as living a meaningful life. And that is the result of having family and friends, setting long-range goals, meeting challenges with courage and conviction, and being true to yourself.

Ahem, I have been saying this, too, for the longest time.  Damn, I am good!

Life is good. Pure luck.

George Orwell wonderfully phrased it when he wrote, "'To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle."

If I ever needed a reminder, well, it was a lesson that was wasted on me today because there I was driving behind a vehicle in which the letters in the spare-tire cover read "Life is Good." No struggle to read what was right in front of my nose!

I took out my camera and clicked even as we were speeding along.  I knew it would be a shaky, fuzzy shot.  But, life is not always about perfection.  Life is all about enjoying the imperfections, the blemishes, too.  "Warts and all" as they say.

Life is good indeed.

I am nowhere the Ebola zone.
I am not anywhere near bombs bursting in air.
I am not freezing to death without a shelter.
I am not standing in street corners hoping to get some food.
That kind of a listing is endless.

Life is good.

Soon the "good luck" vehicle and I went our ways.

A pickup truck overtook me. The license plate grabbed my attention because it was personalized.  I love some of those personalized plates in which the words seem like a cryptic Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle that then forces me think about what it might mean.  An obsessive compulsive disorder, perhaps, to try to solve those personalized puzzles.

But, this one on the pickup truck was easy: PURLUCK.

Indeed, my good life is thanks to pure luck.

The very moment that I was born, thousands of babies were born in India alone, leave alone the rest of the world.  But, how many of those hundreds of thousands of babies that share my birthday live as good a life as I do?  Come to think of it, how many of my fellow-birthday-babies are already dead?

My good life is pure luck.

I reached home.

I realized that there was no leftover food that I could quickly reheat and eat.  But, I didn't complain. Because, I know life is good.

I chopped up cauliflower, carrots, and a tiny piece of broccoli that was hanging loose with these vegetables.  Sauteed with oil, chili flakes, and cilantro, and served over a bed of white Basmati rice.

Life is good.
Pure luck!

Sometimes, it is just Dumb Luck!

As much as we might believe that it is up to ourselves to figure out what we want to do in life, and how we would like to be remembered, we can't forget that one piece in this: dumb luck.

Take, for instance, my return to academia.  There I was an unhappy transportation planner, when all I wanted to do was to be engaged in a world of ideas. Academia.  Years went on. One became two and quickly it became my fifth year there and I got one of those dull and boring form-letter style certificate of appreciation.  I worried that I would die young from not enjoying what I did.

One day, an intern, Robert, who was working on his undergraduate degree at the local university after a stint as an army officer, asked me whether I would be interested to guest-lecture at one of the classes he was in.  Based on our conversations, he apparently decided to suggest that to his professor, but wanted to check with me first.

As a colleague used to say, I simply wait for opportunities to exercise my lower jaw and I bet I said "yes of course, yes!!!"

A week later I guest-lectured.

A month later, I was an adjunct professor teaching a course in the evening.

Two terms of adjunct teaching later, I had a tempting offer to work there as a non-tenure-track full-time lecturer and direct an interdisciplinary major.

Two years after that, I had the job offer from Oregon.  It has been eleven years at Oregon now!

Dumb luck, don't you agree?

Dumb Luck
Corey Marks

 
The horse—its number smudged
by sweat and thumbs nuzzling
 
predictable exactas
stamped in black—stumbles
 
at the last, run too hard, run
beyond what her ankles could bear,
 
and the jockey, who’d driven
her ahead of the other horses
 
now churning past and flinging
back rings of dust, rides
 
her down, out of the grace
and rush of the race and into the hoof-
 
torn dirt, the shit and grit
and the shudder he’s lost control of...
 
Then another rush: people
flurry to the fallen animal, the jockey
 
is raised, stunned and still
he feels he’s moving—something roils
 
in him, around him, under him.
Words are inconsequential
 
as flies. Dumb luck.
The animal won’t rise.
 
Nearby, the winner paces,
cooling, saddled now with the reason
 
for the day, heavy chest
widening against his rider’s approval,
 
each breath ragged and expendable
and replaceable as the printed bets
 
that drift the grounds, skittering
between knuckles of grass
 
beneath the stands where people
stare, the ones who got it wrong,
 
used to seeing what doesn’t come,
to wagering chances bound to be
 
nothing, nothing, nothing
but lost. Though someone got it right
 
and smacks his ticket
against his palm, exactly sure
 
of what it bears. He looks away
as the crowd around him cranes
 
and gawks into the afterlife
of chance—a white truck,
 
a man with an open-mouthed kit.
A needle. A hurtling world
 
closes like a gate.


The Threepenny Review
Fall 2010
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