Opportunities Are There To Be Grasped

This is something I have believed for a while, but the events of the past few days have only confirmed this to me.

Me and a few friends are currently driving around Europe. We bought an old car for this trip, which isn’t the best but is up to the job of getting us around the continent.

We arrived in Valencia the other day and began to park up the car, however, there appeared to be an issue. The power steering wasn’t working and turning the wheel and getting the car into the bay was much harder than it should be.

Once we got the car parked up, we took a look a what was going on inside. After a few minutes of poking around and investigating, we found the culprit. A belt close to the engine had snapped. Immediately, I thought this was the timing belt that helps to power the engine.

If this snaps it can seriously damage your engine. I was worried the car may be off the road for a while. If that was the case, it would seriously impact our trip and potentially end it prematurely.

As it was Friday night when we arrived and most of the garages in the city would not be open again until Monday morning, we had little choice but to wait until then to try and rectify the situation.

Despite being in an awful situation, we still managed to have a good time in Valencia and get out of the city quickly. Why was this the case? A lack of knowledge about the inner workings of cars was one factor, but there was a large slice of luck involved too.

We could have broken down in the middle of nowhere, instead, the car stopped working in a big city. The car could have been broken for a long time, but we got fixed in a few days.

We were very lucky, the situation could have been a lot worse. We try and plan our lives as best as we can, but we are all at the mercy of chaos, and sometimes, we need a little bit of luck to help us along the way.

Luck or Probability?

There is a debate about whether luck exists or not. The case for this is that we assign events as ‘lucky’ once that event has finished. An example would be wearing a red shirt to watch your football team play.

Sometimes they win and sometimes they lose. However, whenever you go watch them play in your red shirt, they always seem to win. More so than when you wear a different colour shirt.

You may assign this down to your T-shirt being lucky, but clothes have no intrinsic lucky abilities. Wearing your red T-shirt does not impact the players on the field.

Instead of reflecting on the information you had at the time, you are assigning significance to events once they are over, as a way of helping yourself cope with what happened.

It’s harder to swallow the reality that according to the laws of probability. Sometimes your team will win and sometimes they will lose, and that this is all beyond your control, no matter how much you want to control the outcome.

With that said, life is a sequence of events that occur according to chance. The majority of what occurs in our lives is all down to chance. Meeting your partner could be a case of being in the right place at the right time. You happened to bump into each other in a bar one night. You may assign this to fate, but it was simply a chance meeting, the kind that we experience almost on a daily basis.

While the laws of probability may be a more accurate description of luck, it still plays a significant role in our lives. What we consider luck is often making the most of the opportunities and situations we are presented with.

Our car breaking down in Valencia is case in point. We could have easily checked into our hostel on Friday night and gone straight to bed, miserable that our car had failed us. Instead, we decided to go to the hostel bar and make the most of a bad situation.

Once we were there, we got talking to a few people and ended up going out with them for the night. During the next few days, we did a few activities with them. I could put this down to luck, but it wasn’t luck. There was nothing lucky about the situation, we took advantage of an opportunity that was afforded to us.

The car, on the other hand, is harder not to ascribe as luck. The fact it broke down in the middle of a busy city as opposed to the middle of nowhere on a motorway was extremely lucky. It is a simple case of probability, but it can’t help but feel like luck when you get a stroke of good fortune such as this.

Another positive sign was that we were very fortunate to get it fixed quickly and for a fair price. We broke down next to the football stadium, and there was a garage a two-minute walk away. They were able to recover the car and fix it with the minimum of fuss.

Again, this was another fortunate outcome. Had the car broken down further out of the city, getting the car to a garage would have been tricky. We were also fortunate that the mechanic who fixed the car was an all-around good guy.

Being in a foreign country and not having complete knowledge of the Spanish language, left us at the mercy of the mechanics. Thankfully, they were honest and standup people and they didn’t rip us off. Was that a stroke of luck, or was it just probable that we happen to come across a reputable garage that repaired the car quickly and for a fair price?

I don’t know, but I can’t help feeling like we were very lucky in this how this played out. It certainly could have been a lot worse!

The Takeaway

While it’s hard to say whether luck is simply masquerading as probability, what I can say with certainty is that you have to take advantage of the opportunities that are presented to you in life.

It would have been easy to feel sorry for ourselves, but we made the most of a bad situation. Our positive outlook served us well, and we were able to have a good time despite our misfortune.

All of this was down to being open to opportunities. Closing yourself off to the world means you are closing yourself off to opportunities. By doing this you are not letting chance and chaos do their work.

Out of every good and bad situation arises an opportunity. It is up to you to grasp these opportunities because if we don’t our life will not be as fulfilling as it could be.

The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius had an enlightening quote on this subject:

Remember how often you have postponed minding your interest, and let slip those opportunities the gods have given you. It is now high time to consider what sort of world you are part of, and from what kind of governor of it you are descended; that you have a set period assigned you to act in, and unless you improve it to brighten and compose your thoughts, it will quickly run off with you, and be lost beyond recovery.

Opportunity will not always keep knocking. It is our duty to ourselves to make the most of the opportunities we are presented. We cannot control luck or the probability that we will have good fortune, but we can take advantage of the opportunities that arise out of these situations.

To not do so, would be to not live at all.