Bend over for cracking
Luck, Fate, and the Story of How the World’s Leading Chiropractor Saved Young Willy’s Life
Want to change your fate?
No expectations.
No guilt.
No pressure.
To just be. That is my dream, and I’m sure the dream of many. It’s the reason the self-help market has exploded like an atom bomb of pseudoscience, cosmology and recycled sewerage. But what if there is something to it? A secret, held deep by the consciousness of the universe that only the lucky few can tap into. The meaning of life. Why shit happens.
Luck and fate are intertwined like Siamese twins after a failed separation surgery. No one quite knows where one ends and the other begins. The religious and the dreamers gorge themselves on a steady diet of fate and prophecy. Everyone is chosen for a reason. It is written in the stars, or the tea leaves, or in a book several thousand years old and mass printed for hotel bedside tables across the world.
Luck is for the downtrodden and the gamblers. A mysterious force that corrals the randomness of nature and shapes it for the certain lucky few.
Luck makes no sense.
A disease-ridden cockatoo shits on my head and that is good luck. A healthy chihuahua called Missy shits on the linoleum of a pensioner’s kitchen and she slips on it while going for a warm cup of milk to ease her insomnia and she breaks her hip and dies in hospital three weeks later with two dozen tubes snaking out of her fading body and not one single visitor.
Just a case of bad luck.
What fate decided a seven-year-old girl in Somalia should fade from the earth via a slow, lingering starvation so her six-month-old sister has enough nutrients to make it to two before a mosquito trying to ward off its own starvation infects her with malaria and she dies eighteen days later choking on the fluid in her lungs in her mother’s arms 160 kilometres from the nearest hospital?
God works in mysterious ways.
The universe works in mysterious ways.
Joe Dispenza — world leading chiropractor, neuroscientist, author and motivational speaker — would tell you that with a bit of positive thinking, an intention to change the energy that makes up the cells of your body and your mind and the universe we inhabit, and a vision of what you want your future to be, your dreams are within reach. Free will can slice through the hardened layers of social, biological and environmental determinants of life and release your true self into happiness and wealth.
It sounds too good to be true. It sounds, if you will pardon my French, like a pile of steaming horse shit. And not the lucky kind.
One of the earliest converts to Mr. Dispenza’s wisdom was a young orca named Willy.
Trapped by whalers at a young age and sent to an amusement park, Willy was a slave to owners who cared little for his welfare and the freedoms he once enjoyed. Fortunately for Willy, a group of documentary makers were following the life of a young street kid who had recently stumbled across Dispenza’s early teachings. The kid taught Willy that if he imagined a life back out in the ocean with his other orca pals, he needed to put himself into that dream until it became a reality.
With a little quantum physics and some inspirational words from the street kid, they both managed to escape their miserable existences and went on to become great modern philosophers in their own right. At least, that’s how I remember the story.
This isn’t meant to be an attack on Joe Dispenza. One of the central arguments he makes, that the duality between mind and matter does not exist, and that we can change our environment and our body with our thoughts, makes sense. Fake it until you make it. Positivity is infectious. But is it enough?
Luck, fate and dreams all boil down to one thing: our search for meaning. That’s not to say everyone has the same level of intensity in this search. I talked to a man with whom cancer had wiped out nearly his entire family, yet he smiles each day because the sun comes up and he is still breathing. And yet I know a friend who will visit half a dozen fortune tellers if the lid of his baked beans refuses to be prised off with a 25-year-old can opener.
From observation and self-reflection, happiness seems to be doled out inversely proportionate to the amount of time we spend chasing it.
What if the secret to finding happiness is to give up searching for it? Many great thinkers have emphasized the importance of staying in the present moment. Looking back at the past, whether it be the good old days or traumatic experiences, or gazing off into an imagined idyllic future, the present passes us by and our future slips quietly into our past. But where is the line between acceptance and apathy? It’s all well and good to accept a middle-class existence with a steady job, relationship and family, but why should a homeless mother fleeing domestic violence accept her situation? Or the starving Somalian child? Or Willy?
If you thought the secret to the meaning of life would be revealed in this article, you have a level of naivety and unshakeable trust in this writer that I find both humbling and unbelievably scary.
I have no answers.
I could throw out a catchphrase, like love, or purpose, or smashed avo and an almond milk latte (I’ll wait), but despite my shaggy appearance, I am no guru.
All I can say is, the next time you spill your coffee down your shirt on your way to work, ask yourself: was this God/the universe’s plan so the person you have a crush on finally notices you and sparks up a conversation that leads to a relationship and to marriage and to three wonderful children (although one turns out to be a major disappointment and starts a cult dedicated to worshipping nail clippings)?
Or is this a plan to make you mad enough to tell your boss to stick his efficiency measures up his arsehole and you do not realise he trusts your opinion like no other and follows through with your idea, causing severe rectal bleeding and an infection that hospitalizes him for long enough that his job becomes open and you successfully apply for it and use the extra income to buy the Vespa of your dreams?
Or perhaps, just a case of bad luck.
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