Luck of the Draw

In chapter two, Sissela Bok invokes the words of Fredrick Douglas—the African-American social reformer, author, orator, and leader of the Abolishment Movement. Fredrick Douglas, a man born into slavery only to escape, a man who experienced the profound, poignant, and elative moment when he finally found himself beyond the chains of slavery, when asked about his freedom, said the following:

“York, I said I felt as one might be supposed to feel, on escaping from a den of hungry lions. But, in a moment like that, sensations are too intense and too rapid for words.  Anguish and grief, like darkness and rain, may be described, but joy and gladness, like the rainbow of promise, defy alike the pen and pencil” (emphasis mine).   

Do you agree with Douglas that experiential moments of bliss, joy, elation, happiness, et al are beyond description, therefore making happiness difficult to objectively define?

Bok’s quote from Fredrick Douglas skewed my thought in another direction, which drifted beyond the scope of defining happiness.  Douglas’s quote made me reflect the first chapter’s take on luck—stemming from the suggestion that we should be considered lucky to be born, a statement of which I generally concur.   

Although our group discussion focused on the perspective that “we become who we are in part by how we respond to the shifting circumstances which our lives delineate themselves,” I wonder if this perspective would be possible if one’s “luck” was to be born into slavery?  “Shifting circumstances”—or the lack thereof—would be an understatement.  Sure, one could throw on the stoic’s armor of Seneca or Epictetus, but Bok’s previous thought seems to ring hollow in light of great oppression: “It makes no sense, from such a perspective, to settle into the rut of blaming parents, society, or fate for the course one’s life has taken; or to feel locked into some particular mold that nothing can crack open.”  Maybe it’s the metaphorical abandonment of the phrase “locked into some particular mold” that falls short.

Although I’ve all but given up on finding some universally profound quote to save all of humanity, I stumbled across this one from William James: “The greatest use of life is to spend on something that will outlast it.”  Even though Fredrick Douglas escaped his bondage, sadly, that was an isolated case. Today, many are faced with a much more subtle form of social bondage, e.g., unemployment, under-employment, sickness, racism, discrimination, etc., which is often a barrier for many to literally survive—when life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness descends beyond the grasp of humanity. 

I would venture to say that we all have experienced some difficulty in life or know someone who is presently in impossible circumstances—circumstances where there’s a will but not a way.  It’s hard to look on the bright side of life when you’re literally or figuratively tied to the whipping post—or as the expression goes: as luck would have it.