Acknowledging the role fortune plays in your life
For most of my life I’ve felt ‘in control’ — there have been brief times that have challenged that state (for example, a painful divorce about 17 years ago) but, for the majority of my 56 years in this world, life has dealt me very few ‘bad hands’.
It was chance and the efforts of others (certainly nothing I did myself) that meant I grew up in a stable home, with two loving parents. I was intelligent in ways that allowed me to excel at school and to be the first of my family to go to university (in the days when you didn’t have to pay for your degree). I was fortunate to land one of just thirty places on a graduate training scheme with the international division of a bank that afforded me postings, at an early age, to exotic far away places.
It was certainly pure chance I was in Hong Kong in 1989 at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre — an event that triggered me being moved from the more mundane banking activity of lending and credit into the bank’s dealing room — which meant that when I returned to London, I found myself in the investment banking division. This meant I worked in the part of the banking industry with the highest remuneration, furnishing me with a high salary (and three more overseas postings) over the next two decades.
This isn’t false modesty — I clearly needed to take the chances offered to me — but it would be arrogant and delusional to fail to recognise how much simply required me to work hard and be a willing recipient of such good fortune.
Divorce and a decision to resign my well paid job was a severe hit to my financial position around 2004/05 — after 12 months away from banking, a headhunter told me I was basically “unemployable” — but once again fortune smiled on me when a former colleague gave me a six month contract and the chance, once again, to ‘find my feet’ (this opportunity was such a vote of confidence and kindness, at one of my lowest points in my life, that I can’t talk about it, still, without getting emotional).
Within months I was employed permanently and met, and fell in love again. She was similarly employed in financial services and after the financial crisis, interest rates at historical lows allowed us, several years later, to afford the mortgage on our own home.
I been blessed with good health, and the same can be said for the majority of my friends and family — the premature loss of friends and family has been rare.
All of the above is simply background to explain how I found myself in such a privileged position that I could simply resign my job in late 2018, when I started to fully comprehend and focus on the climate and ecological crises.
More importantly, it’s an opportunity to publicly acknowledge how that privilege was down to both others and a huge amount of good luck (the Lefty Gomez quote “I’d rather be lucky than good” resonates with me).
It’s not fashionable in current Western culture to acknowledge how much chance (or luck) plays in anyone being successful — we are bombarded with self help advice and told that being ‘successful’ is entirely within one’s own grasp — but it seems to me that the death of community and the rise of individualism encourages us to downplay those contributions for which we can take no credit.
Indeed, to deny how much we need community, and rely on others for happy and flourishing lives, risks making things worse as we start to experience the impacts of the climate and ecological crises on our (privileged, western) lives and the lives of those closest to us.
For most of my life I’ve felt ‘in control’…but no longer.
Now I accept I will have to live with an increasing lack of control. Recognising how much luck and the contribution of others has played in my life so far is, I feel, a good foundation from which to approach the remainder of my life and contemplate how ‘to be’ in the years ahead (for however long we have left).
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this piece I’d be very grateful if you would consider sharing it via whatever social media platforms you use and please follow me on Twitter (@AndMedh). I will continue to write stuff for no other reason than it’s therapeutic in these scary times…
