Do we make our own luck?

Some people claim to be very unlucky. Bad hair days, bad grades, family problems, pigeon shit on a meeting day. Is it their own fault? Is it up to us to choose whether we get lucky or unlucky?

I broke my knee during my best basketball season; once a painting fell from the wall right on my head; I got bed bugs during my trip around Europe; a "friend" of mine spread a nude of me across the internet; once I asked a guy I had just met, where he lived, out of nowhere; and I lost my flight back home last Monday. And I'm not even getting into real personal issues, but I can't seem to call myself unlucky.

My broken knee made me realise how grateful I am for having legs and get to walk and run. That painting fall, turned into one of the biggest laughs I had this year. I didn't stop enjoying my European "inter-bus" trip, although my body was fully covered with itchy bug bites. That guy and I became friends afterwards. The nude story led to the darkest summer of my life -- the nude was taken by that 'friend', not by me, which made it even worse - but it showed me who my real friends were, and changed my perspective about that "subject". And, the first time I was flying back to Portugal since I'm here, I lost my flight. I stayed up all night because I was doing work, I had to buy a new flight, and on the new flight I couldn't get any rest due to some young ladies' gibber.

Still, I consider myself such a lucky person. My life is actually stocked with many unexplainable very pure lucky events. Most of the time, everything seems to be on my side, so I cannot complain.

For example, on the other day I went to the cinema. I was supposed to spend £9 (£3 on the bus + £6 on the ticket). However, one of my flatmates had bought a daily bus ticket that he no longer needed on that day, so he gave it to me. I was already saving £3. At home, moments before the movie, I was trying to buy the ticket online but my card got declined - twice - so I gave up and decided to buy it there. When I got to the cinema there was a group of guys in the queue, and apparently one of their friends couldn't come, and they had already bought his ticket, so they gave it to me. The £10 I had on my wallet that they, came back home with me.

Or, when I got two chocolate bars for the price of one because the man has only noticed one of them. And, if you're not convinced yet, today I went for food to Aldi (16min walk from my house) by the time I left, I had four full bags that I couldn't even handle myself, and an umbrella because it was raining. During my way back home, I had to make a few stops to rest. On what happened to be my last stop, I put one of the bags on a wall, it fell. My eggs were broken but I decided to keep on going when suddenly the door of the house opens and the owner gave me a ride back home. Very nice guy, looking for someone to take care of his mother: so if you know someone let me know!

The thing is, things like this don't happen to me once in a while, they're constantly happening. Why? I have no idea. Is it positive thinking? I don't know, I have my depressing days as everyone else. Is my luck equalised with my bad luck? Perhaps but, if so, why bad situations don't get me as low as the good ones get me high?

As Mark Manson pus it, "we are always choosing the values by which we live and the metrics which we measure everything that happens to us. Often the same event can be good or bad, depending on the metric we choose to use". I believe in this more and more every single day, we are always able to overcome things that happened to us because we are responsible for the way we choose to react to a certain event, and how we interpret it.

Perhaps I am not that lucky - and you are not that unlucky - perhaps we just have very different values and, therefore, we see things in completely different ways. It's all about perspective.

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