Lucky? Serendipitous?

A man was once watching professional golfer Gary Player hit practice shots out of a sand trap.  After a minute or two the golf pro hit two or three shots in a row into the hole—a remarkable feat—and the observer commented on it.  Gary turned to the man and said: “Yes, it’s funny, isn’t it.  It seems the harder I work the luckier I get.” 

 

“Serendipity is nice, but hoping for luck and the magic of happenstance shouldn’t be a lack of excuse for proactivity.  I had to learn for myself that waiting isn’t a life plan.”   Karen Finerman

A seeming counterpoint for Ms. Finerman’s last sentence (above) is provided by poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in the last three stanzas--and last word-- of his favorite (for me) poem ‘A Psalm of Life’:

            Lives of great men all remind us

                We can make our lives sublime,

            And, departing, leave behind us

                Footprints on the sands of time.

            Footprints, that perhaps another,

                Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,

            A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,

                Seeing, shall take heart again.

            Let us then be up and doing,

                With a heart for any fate;

            Still achieving, still pursuing

                Learn to labor and to wait. 

 

“For a Christian, there are, strictly speaking, no chances. A secret Master of the Ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples "Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you," can truly say to every group of Christian friends "You have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another." The Friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others. They are no greater than the beauties of a thousand other men; by Friendship God opens our eyes to them. They are, like all beauties, derived from Him, and then, in a good Friendship, increased by Him through the Friendship itself, so that it is His instrument for creating as well as for revealing.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Each of the above provocative quotes leads me to quoting a wonderful poem by a nineteenth century poet by the name of Alice Cary.  Ponder her poem “Nobility”:

            True worth is in being, not seeming,--

                 In doing, each day that goes by,

            Some little good—not in dreaming

                Of great things to do by and by.

            For whatever men say in their blindness,

                And spite of the fancies of youth,

            There’s nothing so kingly as kindness,

                And nothing so royal as truth.

            We get back our mete as we measure—

                We cannot do wrong and feel right,

            Nor can we give pain and gain pleasure,

                For justice avenges each slight.

            The air for wing of the sparrow,

                The bush for the robin and wren,

            But always the path that is narrow

                And straight, for the children of men.

            ‘Tis not in the pages of story

                The heart of its ill to beguile,

            Though he who makes courtship to glory

                Gives all that he hath for her smile.

            For when from her heights he has won her,

                Alas! It is only to prove

            That nothing’s so sacred as honor,

                And nothing so loyal as love!

            We cannot make bargains for blisses,

                Nor catch them like fishes in nets;

            And sometimes the thing our life misses

                Helps more than the thing which it gets.

            For good lieth not in pursuing,

                Nor gaining of great nor of small,

            But just in the doing, and doing

                As we would be done by, is all.  

Lucky?  Serendipitous?  Maybe just work and reward.