Thomas Sullivan

I love writing about 4-letter words. Mort Castle beat me to this one about five months ago. He wrote about LUCK. Didn’t say whether it was good luck or bad, but from the standpoint of whether wild cards get dealt into our lives from some unseen dealer or we just parlay fear and coincidence into a gestalt and call it chance, it doesn’t matter. To have more of one kind of luck is to have less of the other, so I’ll be covering them both either directly or by inference. Here’s what I blogged Mort after his column…

Sully said…

I’ve been snake-bit and I’ve been lucky to the point where you tremble with gratitude. Maybe it’s just a matter of semantics to call it “luck.” Maybe the gods of irony are having their game. The improbabilities in my corner of the universe are convincing, though. I don’t challenge them. For every time I’ve paid the price in frustration, futility, incredibly bad timing, it seems like there’s a transcendent moment or a fortuitous meeting that saves or changes a life – mine. And once, my son’s. Or is that all the scorekeeper’s bias? If you try to keep track, you invite the silver pinball to track a new route. We are tokens in a cosmic game. Don’t mess with the players.

Hey, Mort, dunno how the hell you came up with “luck” as a topic, but it was…uh, lucky. Opens up some ephemeral possibilities in this blog for me, and man, you know I don’t stick to the rules very often.

– Sully (Thomas Sullivan)

I guess what I’m really interested in here is that bit about the gods of irony. That’s the face I’ve put on my own mysteries of coincidence, clustering, superstition, fate, karma, kismet, paranoia, destiny, fear and hope. Underline hope. Because if you’re a writer – or any player in the game of fame and fortune – then by definition you’re caught up in the psychology of hope.

I like to believe that hope gets the ball rolling. For those who reach for any distinction, it is their first spark of independence, of yearning for perfection, their first dare to rise above the mandated herd mentality. But it has an evil twin. A 4-letter twin, of course. Fear. Hard to have one without the other. Because if you are impertinent enough to hope for some sort of excellence or wide-spread acceptance, then you fear failure and rejection. And if you live in an emotional bunker, never risking failure, it means those fears are worried sick about whatever it is you secretly want and hope for. I guess most of us choose which one to listen to in our up and down moments. In my sidewise observation of human nature, fears come first, because if you ignore something that could kill you, it could…um, kill you. Hope is more a leisure time thing (of course, you can “hope” you don’t get killed, but don’t badger me with semantics). You know what I mean. We take care of our fears first. On the other hand, if we give fear too much power over our lives, guess what happens? Yeah. Nothin’. We stay in the middle of the pack where we don’t risk wolves picking us off, but our individuality gets trampled and smothered. We live by other people’s expectations in a way that doesn’t make them feel that their values are being challenged, and society rewards us with nice, sterile acceptance. I think you get tears or something when you check-out for the big dirt nap at the end of life. If I sound bitter, it’s because I’m one of those unrepentant romantic idealists who can’t live any other way. I want acceptance on my terms. In fact, acceptance from others isn’t important except to give me a voice. To miss all the excellence I want is like not breathing; it’s like living my life in theory instead of for real. As The Bard wrote: “To thine own self be true…” Hey, what do you expect, he was a writer.

So the whole point for those who hope for perfection in the first place is that we’re willing to risk what fear doesn’t want us to go for. And because perfection is rare, persevering is the name of the game. You hear the mantra in every field of endeavor: “Stay the course,” “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again,” “Quitters never win and winners never quit,” “That which builds slowly endures,” “What, me worry?” – just wanted to see if you were paying attention on that last one. Success at the high end of uniqueness is rare precisely because attrition pares away all but the worthy who dare to aspire to perfection.

So in that environment of hope and fear, naturally everyone is looking for a leg up. That’s where luck comes in, good and bad. And superstition. You could call it a control issue. When you run out of ways to control your fate, you start to notice the spooky stuff that might be throwing you curves or rewarding you. Like what hat you were wearing the day you got a hole-in-one, or that whenever you see a certain commercial you get bad news, or which mailbox you used to send in your ms when an editor actually wrote back a personal rejection letter. The live letter suggested that you seek therapy and never have children, but hey, a personal touch is nice. We really haven’t come that far from early hunter/gatherer societies who talked to trees and sacrificed their virgins to appease volcanoes (thereby proving that abstinence isn’t always good).

While courting good luck or avoiding bad can be just frivolous fun, or even mildly motivational, people who reach for brass rings often struggle with a crippling mind-set when frustration or rejection become overwhelming. It comes with the territory, if you’re a writer. You work in isolation for long periods of time, and when you are finished you come blinking into the light all vulnerable and unsure, and you cram your tender hopes into a plain brown wrapper to an editor who is looking for a book about two albino dwarves who fall in love after washing ashore on the white sands of a deserted island. Fortune must be smiling on you, because your book just happens to be about two albino dwarves who fall in love after washing ashore on the black sands of a deserted island, and that’s close enough for an easy revision. But then fate throws you an elbow, because the editor simultaneously receives a ms of the white sand persuasion, and the rejection letter says, “…our decision is not a commentary on the merit of your work, but merely reflects our editorial needs.” Second opinion? You get it, and a third, and a thirtieth, and you never know the details, but the fickleness of the process and the powerless you feel drive you to believe in whim, chance, crass causality and…superstition! You take vacations called “depression,” an
d you give up writing (16 times and counting), and you try escapes, addictions, Zen, volunteering as the school crossing guard, and meaningful acts of politically correct purification like marching in the parking lot of Wal-Mart’s carrying a sign that reads SAVE THE GAY BABY WHALES FOR JESUS.

I figure I’ve learned how to lose in just about all the ways it can be done. I am an expert on failure, and I’ll put my credentials up against anyone’s in that field of expertise. Trying to get that leg up I mentioned can be seriously ugly. Sometimes I’ve felt like a 3-legged stallion hopping alongside a merry-go-round trying to make love to a plastic mare. And just when I thought I’d bottomed out in despair, frustration and indignity, guess what? The stallion broke another leg. That’s when you find out whether you’re into life for reality or just appearances. You really have to get over pride if you want to survive. You have to learn to laugh at what isn’t important. Like your fears. What’s the worst that can happen to you? You’re wrong, you fail, you’re rejected? 99 times out of 100 those things never happen, if you don’t let them happen between your ears. The quality of the moments and your outlook determines the success of the day. You can’t fail if you win the moments, and you do that with what you see in the world around you, how you think, and what you share in relationships. You have to find the courage to stay in the Land of Hope. Hope is a journey. Fear is a dead end. Happiness is being in motion, taking in as much of life as you can. Unhappiness is doing nothing when you could.

But sometimes being a writer makes you feel like you’re on permanent hold. I don’t like to even think about all the time and energy I dropped into that permanent mind-sink. I became very, very good at noticing and then ANTICIPATING all the negatives. Bad luck? I was the poster child. No point in trying. If good things had happened to me (and often they did), I was too busy suffering to enjoy them. My first novel sale came when I got tired of quitting writing and was really pissed off at the world and decided to give it what it wanted. I phoned up the local TV weather guy, asked which way the winds blew on Mars, and concocted a potboiler novel in 23 days by the name of DIAPASON. Of course, it sold right out the door and made the company’s best-seller list. Point proven.

But what was the point? DIAPASON (or DIAPERPIN, as my writer friend Loren Estleman called it) wasn’t me. I had proven I could be someone I wasn’t. I had proven that luck of either good or bad persuasion didn’t have to be a factor. I had proven that I could take responsibility for my own destiny without waiting to be informed by cues and omens. Chance or choice. Trusting externals to push you into a decision is surrendering control to the whims of circumstance. And sometimes the difference between perceived failure and success is the difference between luck and pluck. Of course, “pluck” is a 5-letter word. Consider it an upgrade.

My considerable imagination was good at building those gestalts of luck, so I decided to use exaggeration as a way to gain control. Superstition and luck are the gods of irony having their fun, I decided. And you know, it’s not a bad model for explaining the universe.

A funny thing happened on the way to mental health. I came to recognize the large swings of compensation in life. Even now, things I thought were past all possibility turn out to be more than viable. These include love and the saving of my son’s life. I do not know if this is some wonderful balancing of cosmic equilibrium and harmony by the gods of irony, but I do not doubt that similar life-shaping events are offered to all of us. It may be that they test our faith or the strength of our demons. They come at moments that are seldom convenient and are easily missed, and thereby we define our own destinies. “Luck,” ultimately is a spectator to choice. Such opportunities may not come by the laws of chance, but they may be a law. It may be The Great Divide in personalities and in how you live your life. I think of other mantras I’ve heard that are based on the endless song of the heart-mind duet: “A coward dies a thousand deaths,” “Scared money never wins.” Keep faith with the bottom line and the details will trend the way you want. It’s hope over fear. Fear grows in a vacuum; things like hope and love and courage grow in a garden where they can be nurtured. If you starve the positive side of your life, don’t be surprised to find that negatives take over like weeds. It is never easy to fulfill one’s potential, and if you think it is, you haven’t fulfilled yours yet.

I will never abrogate responsibility for my fate again. I will seize perfection if I see it. I am a free person and I’ve remained true to my truest ideals. Among those is to be the most optimum me I can be and to live my life in the garden rather than the vacuum. I regret every minute I’ve given to fears. Those were the fictions of my life. They are the cause of all my stress and missed happiness. Thankfully, they did not win in the things that mattered, two of which I’ve mentioned – love and the saving of my son’s life. I had intended to share a letter with you I wrote to my son after his near-drowning, but as usual I’m running long. So this is going to be two parts now. Here’s a little sample of something else I wrote about my lad, taken from my latest newsletter: “It’s miraculous how a love that is meant to be can find two hearts across time and space. My son and his were just united. Sean considers himself blind in his right eye, and Tess lost her right eye, so when he saw her on the Internet six months ago…well, I should explain that Tess is a rescued black lab pup up for adoption. Sean is on the road all day, so he didn’t think it would be possible to merge their lives, but when she showed up again (luck or destiny?), he was ready, and this time he’s going to take her home – take her with him everywhere, in fact…” More next month.

Thanks for reading. Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued. My web site is below.
If you’d like to see more of my writing, please check out the free sample chapter from my latest novel, THE WATER WOLF. And if you’d like to receive the monthly newsletter, ask to be added to the list at: mn333mn@earthlink.net

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
www.thomassullivanauthor.com