What If Nothing is Actually Bad Luck?

Tucked inside the character sheet for one of the main characters of my urban fantasy series was a poem by Rumi. Cross-referenced to that poem in my commonplace book were three other bits: a folk tale, thoughts from a stoic philosopher, and a quote by Neitschze. When I read them together, it felt like a gentle storm; one that gave me both some clarity of where the character's story will go in Book 4, and also some soothing balm to salve my ever-present doomscrolling habit. May these pieces also bring you perspective and comfort in whatever difficulty you may face.

It begins with an ancient folktale about perspective...

Good Luck or Bad Luck (Condensed and Rewritten)

There was once an old man who farmed at the edge of a village with his son and their horse.

One morning he woke to find the horse's paddock gate swinging open. The beast had broken free in the night and vanished into the hills. By midday, every neighbor had come by to offer their sympathies.

"What terrible luck," they said. "To lose your only horse."

The old man looked out at the empty paddock. 

His neighbors went home shaking their heads, certain grief and stress had addled his mind.

That very next night, the horse returned. And he didn't come alone. He led twelve wild horses through the gate, and the old man's son was quick enough to close it behind them. Where there had been one horse, now thirteen nickered and stamped their glossy hooves.

The neighbors were back at the fence the next morning. "What extraordinary good luck," they said.

"Who is to say whether it is good luck?" the old man replied.

Some days later, the son climbed onto one of those wild horses to train him. The stallion had never known a rider.

His leg was broken in two and had to be splinted.

The neighbors gathered again. "What terrible bad luck, your only son."

"Who is to say whether it is good luck or bad luck?" said the old man.

The next day the militia came through the valley, conscripting every able-bodied young man to fight in a war many would not survive. They trudged through the village and took every son they could find. When they reached the old man's home and saw his boy lying in bed with a splinted leg, they moved on.

"How lucky you are," the neighbors said.

And the old man smiled.

That old farmer was a wise man, indeed. What stops him from doing what the rest of us often do, which, like the old man's neighbors, is declare the verdict the moment we find the horse is gone? He has the same information the neighbors have. He just refuses to believe the story is finished.

The same principle holds true for our interior lives as well. I used to use this poem by Rumi when I ran therapy groups as a starter, and the sessions stemming from it were often some of the most transformative for the patients.

The Guest House by Rumi

This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they're a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight.

The old man at the paddock and Rumi are pointing at the same thing from different angles. What sweeps through and wrecks the place, the horse that vanishes, the sorrow that upends the furniture, may be carrying something you need, even when you have absolutely no idea what that is yet. It's a different kind of perspective-taking, one that takes a longer view and separates events from our judgments about them. The old man isn't in denial. He's just keeping the door open because he knows the story isn't finished.

My favorite philosopher, the Stoic Epictetus, distills this down to its essence:

I can think of many times in my own life when I thought something was an unmitigated disaster, and it turned out, with the passage of time, to be a boon. Getting laid off once felt like the end of the world, but had I not been, I'd never have landed the job I love now, and I avoided the incoming supervisor who was an absolute tyrant. In the long view, I was the lucky one. I just couldn't see it from inside the empty paddock.

The causal web of both our individual lives and the world is so much larger than any single vantage point. You can't see the connections from inside it. You can only decide whether to keep the verdict open or slam it shut, labeling it 'good' or 'bad'.

Or take the next step and do the arduous, hard inner work of amor fati, to love what is.  Not in retrospect, but right here, right now.

As Friedrich Nietzsche lay ravaged by chronic illness, watching the world move in directions that horrified him, he aimed his striving at amor fati. He sought freedom. Sovereignty over his own inner life. The people around him, and around all of us, expend vast psychic energy fighting reality. Wishing things were different. Consumed by outrage or bitterness about the past or dread of the future. He called this a form of internal slavery, and he wasn't wrong.  

His prescription was to love fate. All of it.

I fail at this. Every time I return to it, my heart rages.

How am I to love the purposeful bombing of schoolchildren? The state murder of protesters? The daily avalanche of news over which I have next to no control? My thoughts move instantly back to the farmer and his empty paddock and to the Guest House, grasping at the small solace that the ills of today may be the pretext from which a more humane era is birthed.

But that isn't loving what is. That's loving what might come out of what is. That is not quite what Nietzsche had in mind.

And yet. Perhaps it is the aiming at amor fati that lands us somewhere more useful than bitterness.

Acceptance.

Followed by right action.

Acceptance of what is frees the emotional energy that rage was consuming. It doesn't produce passivity. Marcus Aurelius was a committed Stoic who believed deeply in acceptance of fate. He also spent most of his reign on the battlefield doing what the situation demanded. He never confused inner acceptance with outer inaction. Rage at what is burns the fuel you need for what must be done.

For me right now that means showing up in the small, local ways that are actually within my reach. Planting seeds with neighbors on the equinox. Showing up for my community. Writing stories that try to metabolize the darkness into something useful. None of it is enough. All of it is something. The old man kept farming. He just stopped wasting psychic energy on the verdict.

I think about all of this when I think about the character Eileen O'Neill.

When we meet Eileen in Hunted by Fae, she is not anyone's idea of a hero. She is a woman carrying fifteen years of wreckage. Failed her daughter. Lost her husband. Lost herself. From the neighbors' perspective, she is all bad luck and worse choices.

But every broken piece of her turns out to be load-bearing.

Post-traumatic growth is real, but it's rarely fast, and it almost never looks like growth while it's happening. Trauma doesn't become a superpower the moment it's survived. It becomes one after it's been faced and metabolized and integrated,, yes perhaps even loved, and that process is slow and nonlinear and ugly in the middle.

What I can tell you without giving anything away is this: the particular nature of what Eileen survived is exactly what makes her the right person for what's coming. Her wound and her calling turn out to be the same thing, just viewed from different sides of the mountain. The guest that swept through her life and left it in ruins was clearing space for something she couldn't have held any other way. Not that she, or any of us, would have chosen it.

She was living the parable the whole time. Standing at the empty paddock, she eventually learns not to declare the verdict too soon.

What is true for Eileen at the personal level turns out to be the same pattern at a societal scale. The story of one person finding that events aren't entirely good or bad until the tale is complete is the shape of how transformation actually works, in a single life and in a civilization.

We are living inside the parable of the old farmer right now. Probably always have been.

The world order we understood feels like it's cracking open. The low hum of dread that something is coming and we can't quite name it or stop it drones in our collective unconscious. It is very easy right now to stand at the fence, look at the empty paddock, and call it over.

But it isn't.

We are not at the end of the story. We are in the messy middle, where things are being swept empty of their furnishings, and where the son has been thrown from the horse. Perhaps if we remain engaged, strive for amor fati, the world that emerges, swept clear of structures that no longer serve, will be the change we've been striving for.

In Book 4, Eileen will face events that will tempt her to bemoan her luck, curl up, and shrink from the world. Time will tell whether she becomes like the old man and glimpses the patterns of reason well enough to step fully into her power.

I suspect she will. She has come too far not to.

Want to dip your toes into The Last Battle of Moytura series?