Today I’d planned to post a wee meditation on luck, one inspired by a recent rereading of The Old Man and the Sea, which reflects on the idea of luck in several ways. And today started off at about 4:15am with what felt like a stroke of good luck, as overnight I’d accomplished something I’ve been trying to do for about two weeks. Suffice it to say, alas, that by 6:00am, in an effort to be kindly and humane, I’d undone said accomplishment. So now it’s back to the drawing board, and I can’t be sure if any of the progress I’d made in the run-up to this stroke of good luck will be preserved.

Luck, I know, is largely attitudinal–it’s not a force so much as an interpretation of events and responsibility for them. The same goes for karma, which I was thinking about when I tried to do the humane thing, to think through what that might finally look like. I would like to say that I did the things I thought were right for decent reasons, but I inadvertently did them wrongly, and the outcome was bad. Short-term retrospection find me blaming myself, and it also has me mulling over the course of action I should take if luck should come round again. It feels as if attempting the kindly, humane approach will doubly important the second time around from a karmic standpoint, assuming I get a second chance, but there’s a vicious part of me that would rather dispense with the kindly approach and go with the conclusive approach, which might leave me with clear-cut closure rather than peace of mind.

The harder task, I think, will be assigning the event to its own pocket dimension of my experience, to stop the train that has set out knowing I did something unwise and is scheduled to hurtle toward the conclusion that I’m a fool or an idiot. My mistake has fouled the morning, but there’s a better than average chance that it will foul the whole day if I allow it to. Friday I made myself miserable because I had a rare free day to work on Chancers and felt like I’d squandered it; I got stuck on an issue in the Armor section of the chapter on Combat, and I stayed gummed up for long enough that I had to call an audible and work on other stuff. By the end of Saturday, however, I’d realized that I needed to relocate the section, that the snag called attention to a problem in logic I could fix with just a little revision.

I’m trying to let the Saturday afternoon version of my consciousness take the lead on today’s mistake, though I know only retrospection and a bit of calm philosophy allowed me to get there. Maybe tomorrow I’ll feel a little better about my miscalculation, but right now it’s a heaping helping of regret.