Dear friend,
How are you? Forgive me for being slow with this one; a thought caught hold of me and I have been stewing in it.
Most of us understand, intellectually, that we are passing through great change at every level, and that change is inevitable. And yet how is it that some people are so miserable in the face of it, so out of luck and opportunity, while others seem joyful no matter what happens, riding the waves of change and opportunity with ease? Joy and luck, misery and misfortune, seem somehow connected. So what is the formula for expanding joy and attracting luck? Can we actually design luck?
On my last Vipassana retreat, a saying of the Buddha caught my attention, and reflecting on it alongside my commitment to helping people live grand lives of joy, I came to see that each of us is always choosing one of four distinct paths. Consider where you are, and where you are headed.
The first path runs from joy to misery. You are in a good place, by work or by luck, thriving. Then something shifts. Your responsibilities change, or you do not get the opportunity, the funding, the title, the promotion you hoped for. Instead of rolling with it, you respond as though you are being diminished and wronged. You begin to blame, your mood slides from responsible engagement into resentment, and you are pulled out of joy into misery, until something interrupts it.
The second path runs from misery to more misery. You are already in a foul mood, feeling powerless and wronged. Something else changes, perhaps something small, and you double down on the blame and the story that “they” are doing this to you. Instead of interrupting the spiral, you feed it. Complaint becomes your way of being, the negativity deepens, and it drags you and others into a darker place. There is no bottom to that valley, until you step onto the third path.
The third path runs from misery to joy. Life has handed you terrible circumstances and left you frustrated and resentful. Then you make a different move. Instead of fuming with ungrounded certainty, you stop and say: wait, maybe I do not know everything here. Maybe there is something to learn, even an opportunity in this change. You open to listening, to counting blessings rather than tallying what you did not get, to giving what you wish you were receiving. The circumstances may not change at once, but your relationship to them does. You become curious and fully responsible, not as blame but as a place to stand, and you begin to move from powerlessness toward power.
The fourth path runs from joy to more joy. You take full responsibility for whatever disrupts you and keep expanding your capacity for it. You meet change head-on, adapting, learning, growing. When life throws a curveball, you keep moving, holding on to possibility, gratitude, and a radical hope. You do not blame; you give others what you would want from them. You stay equanimous when something perturbs you, and you find opportunity in every change. This is not naive optimism. It is the wisdom of knowing that joy is cultivated, never granted or guaranteed. Over time it expands your capacity, your power within, your well-being. And it attracts luck, the gifts just keep coming.
We do not always get what we want, how and when we want it. The game of life is set up to disappoint you, whoever you are. If things are good, hard things are coming. If things are bad, opportunity is coming, sooner or later. You cannot control what happens to you, what others do, what nature does. But you are a human being, and by design you have some agency over how you respond. You can be fully responsible for your emotional reactions and the actions that follow.
So where do you see yourself right now, and where do you want to go? When you are tempted to blame, to complain, to feel wronged, catch yourself before you go too far down that path, and ask: what is possible now? That single question can break the spell of misery and open something lighter and more spacious. And if you see a friend caught in the loop, gently remind them that even when they cannot dictate the circumstances, they can always choose their response.
With care,Saqib