Is it luck or fate? I’ve often wondered. Take a minor car accident, for instance, where no one gets hurt. Are you unlucky to have been in the accident at all, or lucky to have walked away unscathed? Consider a soldier who loses a leg in combat but returns home alive—was he fortunate or unfortunate? Perhaps he was both. Some might argue that luck doesn’t exist at all. But what if there’s a balance, where every instance of bad luck is countered by good luck somewhere else? Let me share some past history, and you can decide.

I remember when I was in my late twenties, working for a seismic company. We were in a wide-track vehicle called a nodwell, making our way up a narrow mountain road that barely fit the vehicle. The driver was new, and as we went along, I looked out and said, “I can’t see the ground under the tracks on my side.” That’s when the vehicle started rolling down the mountainside. We tumbled for about 300 yards, taking several turns, before we slammed into the side of a large tree—the only tree on that stretch of the mountain. Beyond that, it was a sheer drop. Miraculously, we only ended up with a few bumps and bruises. So, lucky or unlucky? How would you call it?

Then there’s the lottery tickets. Are you buying a chance at luck? The odds of winning the big jackpot are astronomical. So, is it lucky to be able to indulge in that small thrill of hope, or is it unlucky because, deep down, you know you’re just being foolish?

Maybe it’s just life—a series of events that unfold, sometimes in our favor, sometimes not. And perhaps the balance of good and bad fortune is always at work, ensuring that life remains a mix of both.

Luck, in its essence, may not be something we can calculate or even fully understand. The lottery tickets, the nodwell tumble, the car crash, or the soldier’s return—they all raise the question of whether life’s events are mere chance or part of some larger design. Maybe luck is just our way of coping with the unknown, something we hold onto when we can't make sense of things. So, you decide: is there really such a thing as luck, or is it all a matter of perspective?

As for me, I’m leaning toward a mixture of both—fate playing its hand and luck dancing around it. But maybe, just maybe, it's neither. Perhaps life unfolds as it will, and it’s up to us to see the luck in surviving and the fate in every twist.