luck noun, verb
noun [U]
1 good things that happen to you by chance, not because of your own efforts or abilities: With (any) luck, we’ll be home before dark. (BrE) With a bit of luck, we’ll finish on time. So far I have had no luck with finding a job. I could hardly believe my luck when he said yes. It was a stroke of luck that we found you. By sheer luck nobody was hurt in the explosion. We wish her luck in her new career. You’re in luck (= lucky)—there’s one ticket left. You’re out of luck. She’s not here. What a piece of luck! The only goal of the match came more by luck than judgement. Finally my luck ran out and they caught me trying to climb the outer wall. She dared not trust to luck that nobody would see her.—see also beginner’s luck
2 chance; the force that causes good or bad things to happen to people fortune: to have good / bad luck I put the loss of the money down to pure bad luck.—see also hard-luck story
verb
luck out (NAmE, informal) to be lucky: I guess I really lucked out when I met her.
"The man who said 'I'd rather be lucky than good' saw deeply into life. People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It's scary to think so much is out of one's control. There are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net and for a split second it can either go forward or fall back. With a little luck it goes forward and you win. Or maybe it doesn't and you lose."
~Chris Wilton, in Match Point
Luck has always been underestimated by people.
People admit that there is luck, of course. But most people fail to see how luck contributes to the significance of human life.
Hardworking people are often acclaimed. But sadly as Wilton (or actually, Woody Allen) rightly said above, being lucky seems to conquer everything.
Luck implies a deeper human situation, which I gladly found in the Oxford English Dictionary, i.e. chance.
No matter how hard you work, there is always a chance that you will fail disastrously.
It's this grim possibility that people often try to ignore. They imagine that there is a harmony between their virtues and happiness. But sorry, not in this life.
Then should we stop all our hard work, sit there and wait for our luck to come? Any three years old knows the answer.
I believe that the world is fair to the extent that the hardworking fellas get more of what they deserved.
However, having the element of luck in life actually makes it more interesting. We do not lead our lives like completing a sudoku. There is always a chance that there will be two "9" filled within a row to make the whole grid fail.
Or you are otherwise lucky, the ball goes forward and you win.
If life is like a play script and we only work very hard to realise what was written, without chance of otherwise, it's actually pretty doomed, and the worst part is, it's unbearably boring.
I rather believe that there is luck, than fate.
Seriousness
ser•ious•ness noun [U, sing.] the state of being serious: He spoke with a seriousness that was unusual in him. We saw from the seriousness of her expression that she meant it.
"Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow." ~ Oscar Wilde
I come across serious people everyday.
It is necessary to distinguish between serious people and sincere people. I am very fond of the latter.
Serious people simply don't understand that life is beyond seriousness. They are only going to end up being very sadly frustrated.
Not only that they are serious about their lives. They seriously comment and concern about others' lives. If people only causally jive about others' lives, they're only nosy. But serious people shove it further; they want you to become just like them and be serious.
Seriousness is an essential component of social movements. Who can take the image of the leader bursts out laughing amid the great march towards a better future? All social activists, to me, are serious people.
So serious people have a future, and are dreamers. People who are not so serious, like myself, live relatively animal lives.
Serious people want you to become part of them. But we laugh.
Seriousness might be one of the most laughable human phenomena.
People who can laugh never have the heart to convince serious people to start laughing, we just simply laugh.
Why so serious?!
"Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow." ~ Oscar Wilde
I come across serious people everyday.
It is necessary to distinguish between serious people and sincere people. I am very fond of the latter.
Serious people simply don't understand that life is beyond seriousness. They are only going to end up being very sadly frustrated.
Not only that they are serious about their lives. They seriously comment and concern about others' lives. If people only causally jive about others' lives, they're only nosy. But serious people shove it further; they want you to become just like them and be serious.
Seriousness is an essential component of social movements. Who can take the image of the leader bursts out laughing amid the great march towards a better future? All social activists, to me, are serious people.
So serious people have a future, and are dreamers. People who are not so serious, like myself, live relatively animal lives.
Serious people want you to become part of them. But we laugh.
Seriousness might be one of the most laughable human phenomena.
People who can laugh never have the heart to convince serious people to start laughing, we just simply laugh.
Why so serious?!
Melancholy
mel•an•choly noun, adj. noun [U] (formal) a deep feeling of sadness that lasts for a long time and often cannot be explained: A mood of melancholy descended on us. There is a brooding melancholy in his black and white photography. adj. very sad or making you feel sadness SYN mournful, sombre: melancholy thoughts / memories. The melancholy song died away.
Melancholy is one of the things in life that I don't really understand.It's a sadness without a cause.
Just because it comes without a cause, it's the most private kind of all sorrow. You simply have no clue what is going on, you don't know how to talk to people about that, sometimes, you don't even want to talk about it.
It just comes and goes. At times, it never leaves.
It seems that ECT was the only effective medical treatment for melancholy. But then, tying myself to the operation chair with two electrodes stuck to my head, and having electric shocks sent in, sounds awkward to me. I don't know if I would become more depressed or what.
Most importantly, I don't know how pathological melancholy is.
Melancholy chooses you.
Choice
choice noun, adj.
noun
1 [C] ~ (between A and B) an act of choosing between two or more possibilities; something that you can choose: women forced to make a choice between family and career. We are faced with a difficult choice.
2 [U, sing.] the right to choose or the possibility of choosing: If I had the choice, I would stop working tomorrow. He had no choice but to leave (= this was the only thing he could do).
3 [C] a person or thing that is chosen: She’s the obvious choice for the job.
4 [sing., U] the number or range of different things from which to choose
adj. (choicer, choicest) [only before noun]
1 (especially of food) of very good quality
2 (NAmE) (of meat) of very good, but not the highest, quality
3 ~ words / phrases carefully chosen words or phrases: She summed up the situation in a few choice phrases. (humorous) He used some pretty choice (= rude or offensive) language.
I came across two types of people at times, either they think that there is no choice at all, but only fate. Or they consider choice being the dignity of human, with that we conquer anything.
The first group of people can either be a pessimist or an optimist; although I cannot agree on the fate-only talk, I think this group of people see certain truth about life.
The latter group of people, who indulge themselves in the dignity of human, ignored an important essence of choice itself.
The pure form of choice is options having equal weight. If options carry different weights, where one is inclined to choose the heaviest one, the choice is actually determined.
We make many of these determined choices everyday, from the choice of coffee or tea to the choice of which career to pursue.
But what's the big deal about determined choices, then? My dog chooses freely everyday rather to pee in his toilet or in the middle of our living room, too. We still have a hard time trying to figure out a way to determine his urination habit.
His choice of pee location sounded freer then my inclined choice for coffee upon breakfast.
Yet, there are certain pure choices we all have to make at certain point of our lives. We necessarily make the choice arbitrarily, because all options carry equal weight and we simply don't know how to choose.
More often than not, critical choices in life are pure choices. And there lies the true freedom, the human dignity we treasure.
The real free choices are those we simply don't know how to choose.
noun
1 [C] ~ (between A and B) an act of choosing between two or more possibilities; something that you can choose: women forced to make a choice between family and career. We are faced with a difficult choice.
2 [U, sing.] the right to choose or the possibility of choosing: If I had the choice, I would stop working tomorrow. He had no choice but to leave (= this was the only thing he could do).
3 [C] a person or thing that is chosen: She’s the obvious choice for the job.
4 [sing., U] the number or range of different things from which to choose
adj. (choicer, choicest) [only before noun]
1 (especially of food) of very good quality
2 (NAmE) (of meat) of very good, but not the highest, quality
3 ~ words / phrases carefully chosen words or phrases: She summed up the situation in a few choice phrases. (humorous) He used some pretty choice (= rude or offensive) language.
I came across two types of people at times, either they think that there is no choice at all, but only fate. Or they consider choice being the dignity of human, with that we conquer anything.
The first group of people can either be a pessimist or an optimist; although I cannot agree on the fate-only talk, I think this group of people see certain truth about life.
The latter group of people, who indulge themselves in the dignity of human, ignored an important essence of choice itself.The pure form of choice is options having equal weight. If options carry different weights, where one is inclined to choose the heaviest one, the choice is actually determined.
We make many of these determined choices everyday, from the choice of coffee or tea to the choice of which career to pursue.
But what's the big deal about determined choices, then? My dog chooses freely everyday rather to pee in his toilet or in the middle of our living room, too. We still have a hard time trying to figure out a way to determine his urination habit.
His choice of pee location sounded freer then my inclined choice for coffee upon breakfast.
Yet, there are certain pure choices we all have to make at certain point of our lives. We necessarily make the choice arbitrarily, because all options carry equal weight and we simply don't know how to choose.
More often than not, critical choices in life are pure choices. And there lies the true freedom, the human dignity we treasure.
The real free choices are those we simply don't know how to choose.
