skills I have always wanted but never learned / how I see luck & am I lucky?
icon: "dancy (a photo of me in profile, dancing with a purple/blue/red striped sheer fabric. The light is stark and highlights the curves of my belly and breasts.)"
What is a skill you've always wished to have, but don't? What had stopped you from pursuing it, or what stopped you from achieving it? (from here)
I always wanted to be able to do structured dance. First it was ballet, then modern dance, then bellydance that I wanted to learn. I took bellydance classes for a little while, but when my teacher (who gave me a discount) stopped teaching I couldn't find anyone who taught near enough and cheap enough. Eventually I stopped looking for a new teacher. I think I was also hindered by lack of someone to do it with - part of my success when I did take classes was that I had a friend taking them with me.
I've also always wanted to paint, blow glass, sculpt, and draw well. In these things also I have not learned due to lack of money, teacher, and classmate. I have self-taught some other skills, but with painting and sculpting, the cheap materials are so much harder to work with, and with glass there is a HUGE financial barrier, and with drawing... I think with drawing I just got discouraged and never found a thing that I needed to draw enough to work at it. I wanted to learn to make fractals from the first time I saw them, but it took me years to even try, and I began with a tutorial. After that I felt like I understood enough to start experimenting.
How would you define luck and would you consider yourself lucky relative to the society you live in?
I define luck as being on the good side of random chance. Most things have a lot of forces pushing them, but when those forces get balanced, it is random chance that decides which way they go. To be lucky is to have those chances fall in your favor. I think you can make this happen. In cases where only the tiniest bit of a push makes the choice, that tiny push can be something like your desire, your prayer, etc. I didn't believe in luck as a thing of itself until I saw a string of such ludicrously bad luck that I felt there must be such a thing, and I took some actions to try and break it and it seemed to help.
A lot of times people use 'lucky' instead of 'privileged' as in "I was lucky to be born white" but that is not luck, because being born white is not a factor of random chance - you had very little chance of having dark skin if both parents were white. Privilege is not luck because it is not random and it is not value-neutral (but privilege and luck can go hand-in-hand).
I consider myself fairly lucky in some respects; I have amazing thrifting luck, and I have had good luck finding amazing friends, and I have good luck with my car. I cultivate this luck by pushing into it with my will so that any time forces are balanced I push them over to my favor.