How to see everything as a fortuitous bounty
I’m an extremely fortunate person, but at that moment I was not feeling it
Recently, I was angry.
I was angry at the world—at the trash-filled sidewalks that I walk my dog on every day, at the slow-walkers with their heads in their phones, and at the klaxon of a buzzer in my apartment letting us know that someone was about to get a delivery.
I’m an extremely fortunate person, but at that moment with the ringing of the buzzer still in my ears, I was not feeling it.
It was around this time that my wife finished reading Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin.
It’s rare that I read a novel before Audra, and I immediately asked her for her favorite highlight from the book. (“Me first!” I shouted.) I told her that mine was the following.
Marx’s persimmons
In Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Marx discovers a persimmon tree in the house that he’s about to move into with Sadie. He can’t believe his luck, proclaiming persimmons to be his “actual favorite” fruit.
Sam used to say that Marx was the most fortunate person he had ever met—he was lucky with lovers, in business, in looks, in life. But the longer Sadie knew Marx, the more she thought Sam hadn’t truly understood the nature of Marx’s good fortune.
The passage continues:
Marx was fortunate because he saw everything as if it were a fortuitous bounty. It was impossible to know—were persimmons his favorite fruit, or had they just now become his favorite fruit because there they were, growing in his own backyard?
My wife’s eyes lit up. It was, she said, also one of her highlights. This got me thinking about fortune, and what it means to have good fortune or not.
Everyday advantages
In The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, the storied founding father writes:
Human felicity is produc’d not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day.
Approximately 220 years later, in The Obstacle is the Way Ryan Holiday tells the story of John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937) who could “see opportunity in every disaster, and transform that negative situation into an education, a skill set, or a fortune.”
Holiday is, of course, referring to Rockefeller turning a negative situation into a monetary fortune, but the point remains: Fortune comes to those who are willing to see it:
The greater the chaos, the calmer Rockefeller would become. You will come across obstacles in life—fair and unfair. And you will discover, time and time again, that what matters most is not what these obstacles are but how we see them.
The astronomical odds
It’s difficult to be angry with the world when we are so fortunate to have been born into it at all; trash-filled sidewalks notwithstanding! To quote the poet Mark Strand, as unearthed in Keep Going by
:The thing to rejoice in is the fact that one had the good fortune to be born. The odds against being born are astronomical.
As Kleon puts it, “None of us know how many days we’ll have, so I’d be a shame to waste the ones we get.”
Going forward, I resolve to better channel Marx’s persimmon tree energy and appreciate my good fortune for the gift that it is.
Where are you on the glass half full spectrum? Do you see everything as a fortuitous bounty, or is this an area you’d like to improve?