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Richard Wiseman’s The Luck Factor begins with a proposition that sounds almost too pleasant to be consequential: some people appear to be luckier because they notice more opportunities, meet more people, trust useful hunches, expect reasonably good outcomes, and recover differently when events go badly.
I came to Wiseman’s work through a talk by Brian Scott about luck. Scott discussed the possibility that attention can become narrowed by old expectations, sometimes beginning surprisingly early, and used the image of widening the aperture again.
Then comes the newspaper experiment.
Wiseman gave self-described lucky and unlucky participants a newspaper and asked them to count the photographs. Inside was a conspicuous message telling them they could stop because there were 43 photographs, and another offered a cash reward for noticing it.
The unlucky participants were substantially more likely to remain absorbed in the assigned task and miss the unexpected information. Wiseman connected that difference to anxiety, attentional focus, and openness to chance opportunities.
I am fascinated by the experiment for a reason that goes beyond becoming luckier.
Run it backward.
What would happen if you wanted to make someone less lucky?
You would not have to arrange a sequence of cartoon catastrophes. You could interfere with the conditions Wiseman associates with luck itself.
Capture enough attention. Increase arousal. Fix expectation around one person, one danger, one grievance, or one outcome. Reduce exploration. Make ambiguity expensive. Encourage repetitive behaviors that consume time but produce little new information. Damage relationships. Reduce confidence in intuition. Make the world progressively smaller.
The person might still be surrounded by opportunities. They would simply have less attention available to find them, and fewer behaviors available for reaching them.
At Fredhappy, Attention is the first Vulnerable Human Strength. The Luck Factor made me wonder whether we have underestimated just how vulnerable it is.
It also sent me somewhere much older.
Humans have been trying to influence one another’s attention, behavior, attachment, choices, fortune, and freedom for a very long time. Binding spells, domination magic, crossing and uncrossing, jinxing, curse tablets, incantation bowls, sigils and seals, Psalms, candle work, protection magic, road opening, attraction work, and elaborate ceremonial traditions appear in radically different cultures and historical periods.
The objects vary. The cosmologies vary. The intentions are sometimes benevolent, sometimes defensive, sometimes openly baneful.
Underneath them is a remarkably persistent human question.
Can another person’s field of possibility be changed? That question takes The Luck Factor into much stranger territory.
First, what actually happens when attention narrows?
The human brain cannot process every available stimulus with equal priority. Selective attention is not a defect. It is how you can read this paragraph while largely ignoring the pressure of your socks, the sound of an appliance in another room, and thousands of objects within your visual field.
The reticular activating system, or RAS, belongs in this discussion, although popular descriptions often ask it to do far more neurological work than it actually does. The ascending reticular activating system is deeply involved in wakefulness, arousal, and the ability to sustain attention, but conscious attention is produced through distributed brain networks involving sensory systems, cortex, thalamus, salience detection, memory, emotion, and executive control.
So the internet shorthand that “your RAS shows you whatever you believe” is too simple.
The more interesting reality is that arousal, expectation, previous learning, current goals, and salience all help determine what wins the competition for limited attention.
Mara Mather and colleagues call one part of this process arousal-biased competition. Arousal can amplify information that already has priority while suppressing competing information. Something important becomes even more important, while peripheral information loses the contest.
This is useful when the important thing really does require your attention.
It becomes costly when the priority refuses to relinquish the microphone.
A difficult email can require careful reading. If three hours later you are still rereading it, replaying the previous conversation, examining punctuation, consulting screenshots, and imagining future arguments without acquiring meaningful new information, your attention has not stopped working.
It has become occupied.
Research on rumination similarly links repetitive negative thinking with difficulty disengaging attention from negative material. Attention remains active, but its available scope can become increasingly constrained.
That distinction matters enormously.
A person whose attention has narrowed may look extraordinarily attentive. They may simply be attending to fewer and fewer things.
An unlucky state can be behaviorally constructed
This is where The Luck Factor becomes more interesting than positive thinking.
Suppose someone develops a strong expectation that other people will reject them. They enter a gathering monitoring facial expressions, tone changes, pauses, and signs of exclusion.
Because threat-related information has priority, ambiguous interactions acquire weight. A distracted person seems cold. A conversation ending naturally feels like dismissal. Meanwhile, the warm introduction from somebody across the room may barely register.
Behavior follows attention.
The person speaks less freely. They remain near the door. They decline an invitation because it feels safer not to risk another rejection. They go home early.
Now reality has actually changed. They met fewer people, which caused fewer opportunities to engage, offer and accept invitations. The smaller behavioral world can then be interpreted as confirmation of the original expectation.
That is the loop I am interested in:
arousal affects attention; attention affects interpretation; interpretation affects behavior; behavior changes which experiences become available; those experiences then influence expectation.
No magical explanation is required for such a loop to become powerful. But humans have created magical languages for remarkably similar states.
What baneful magic is trying to accomplish
This is where the anthropology becomes useful.
If we stop asking whether a particular jar, candle, word, or symbol “works” and instead ask what practitioners intended it to do, a set of mechanisms begins to emerge.
Ancient Greek and Roman binding spells, for example, were used in litigation, competition, love, commerce, and personal conflict. The intended result could be restriction: an opponent should be unable to speak effectively, perform effectively, succeed, resist, or act freely. Scholars now study curse tablets as a form of ritual technology rather than as a single undifferentiated category called superstition.
African American Conjure, Hoodoo, and rootwork encompass both healing and harming, protection and influence. Yvonne Chireau traces Conjure through African, European, American, Christian, and other historical influences, showing it functioning from slavery well into the twentieth century as a practical system concerned with health, relationships, protection, power, conflict, and everyday problems.
Late-antique Mesopotamian incantation bowls show another configuration. Jews, Christians, Mandaeans, Zoroastrians, and others used inscribed bowls in practices concerned largely with protection from harmful beings and conditions; text, image, material object, and placement were combined into one ritual technology.
The point is not that these traditions were secretly doing cognitive psychology.
The point is that they were working deliberately with constraint, direction, protection, attachment, threat, possibility, and agency.
Those are exactly the variables that become interesting when we ask how someone becomes behaviorally lucky or unlucky.
The jar and the bowl: contain the condition
Containers recur in magical traditions for an obvious material reason: they establish an inside and an outside. They can hold, exclude, isolate, preserve, confine, or represent a condition as bounded.
A protective Mesopotamian incantation bowl and a later American jar working are not interchangeable cultural objects, but they share a powerful material idea: something difficult to control in ordinary life can be given boundaries in ritual space.
Naming and containing an amorphous problem also makes it actionable. Baneful container work turns that logic outward: hold another person in a condition, constrain a relationship or movement, or symbolically fix circumstances in place.
In the context of luck, that matters. A person whose behavior becomes fixed has fewer opportunities to encounter the unpredictable. Wiseman’s lucky world depends upon movement.
Fire and Candle Work: Color, Flame, Omen, and Attention
Where a container can hold a condition, fire can transform one. Its light, movement, heat, color, smoke, wax, duration, and eventual extinguishment give the practitioner something continuously changing to observe.
A practitioner may therefore be working with culturally inherited color correspondences, personal and cultural associations with color, the visual salience of flame, symbolic transformation through burning, and expectation at the same time.
European folk traditions sometimes treated fire itself as information. Material collected by the Irish Folklore Commission records Halloween divination in which bright-burning candles indicated good fortune, smoking and spluttering foretold reverses, and ordinary burning suggested ordinary luck.
Once flame behavior has meaning, every flicker becomes potentially informative. A flare or sputter can be interpreted as warning, resistance, acceptance, reversal, failure, or confirmation according to the system being used. Watching produces more variation to interpret, which can produce still more watching.
South Asian traditions use flame differently. Trāṭaka, a yogic practice of concentrated gazing, commonly uses a candle flame to train sustained visual attention before moving toward internal visualization and defocusing. Small experimental studies have reported changes in selective attention and other cognitive measures following trāṭaka practice.
In Japanese Shingon Buddhism, goma fire ritual, with historical roots extending through India and China into Japan, places fire within a larger ceremonial system of offerings, mantra, gesture, prayer, purification, and transformation.
These practices are culturally distinct, but together they reveal something useful for our question: humans repeatedly use fire to concentrate attention around change.
That makes fire relevant to luck. It can symbolize what should increase, disappear, transform, remain protected, or become possible. In baneful work, the same attentional focus can be directed toward another person's restriction, separation, confusion, loss, or diminished fortune.
Humans can turn fluctuating sensory information into a highly charged field of expectation. Expectation then influences what gets noticed next.
Spectacle: Fireworks, Flash, Noise, and the Capture of a Crowd
Fireworks add something we have not yet considered: collective attention. A sudden explosion of light and sound does not merely capture one person's attention; hundreds or thousands of people simultaneously turn toward the same point in the sky. Other people's gaze reinforces the direction of our own, while studies of collective ritual have found physiological arousal becoming correlated among participants and emotionally connected spectators.
For a few minutes, thousands of private attentional worlds become organized around the same event. Religious ceremonies, political rallies, sporting events, concerts, military parades, protests, revival meetings, royal processions, initiations, and magical rituals can all use sensory intensity to accomplish something similar. The question is no longer simply what captures my attention, but what captures ours.
Collective attention can produce awe, solidarity, reverence, fear, obedience, excitement, or ecstatic release. It can also influence what a group regards as important, threatening, sacred, desirable, or true. Human attention can be captured individually, but it can also be gathered.
Sound, Chant, Drone, and Dance: Giving Attention a Rhythm
Sound controls attention differently from a static visual symbol because it unfolds through time. Once a rhythm begins, the next beat becomes predictable enough to anticipate but has not yet arrived, repeatedly drawing attention forward.
Drumming, chanting, mantra, repetitive prayer, song, clapping, marching, and dance appear across ritual traditions in part because rhythm can organize bodies as well as thought. A recent neuroscientific review of rhythmic sound found evidence consistent with absorption and relaxation during drumming and related repetitive auditory stimulation, while emphasizing that the neural research remains heterogeneous. Research on chanting likewise identifies recurring elements of repetition, focused attention, controlled breathing, and interpersonal synchrony.
The drone does something different from the beat. A continuous tone can become an acoustic floor on which everything else occurs. The Australian instrument widely called the didjeridu, known by different names in different Aboriginal language groups, is traditionally used with song and percussion in northern Australian traditions and can produce sustained low drone tones with rhythmic variation.
A drone can occupy attention without repeatedly startling it. After a while, it may hover at the boundary between what is actively noticed and what has become the sensory environment itself. Cicadas can produce a similar perceptual experience: unmistakable at first, then seemingly part of the atmosphere, until sudden silence makes their former presence conspicuous. The example illustrates how readily sound moves between foreground and background as attention continually recalculates what deserves conscious priority.
Dance brings the body into the mechanism. Experimental work has found that synchronous movement and physiological arousal can increase group cohesion and cooperation, while studies of dance have found independent effects of synchrony and exertion on social bonding. A ritual combining rhythm, voice, breath, movement, and other bodies can therefore alter more than what someone is thinking about; it can change the state in which the thinking occurs.
That range matters. Rhythm can regulate an infant, chant can sustain prayer, drumming can support absorption, dance can intensify belonging, and marching can coordinate a group. The same capacities can enlarge human experience or make the surrounding group more behaviorally compelling.
The world competing for our attention is not composed only of ideas. It is also composed of tempo, sound, voice, repetition, silence, movement, and other bodies.
Gaze, Pointing, and the Human Power to Decide What Someone Else Sees
Humans have also learned an extraordinarily effective attentional technology: someone looks somewhere, and we tend to look too. Gaze cueing is one of the most robust findings in the social-attention literature.
A large meta-analysis covering hundreds of gaze-cueing effects found that another person's eye direction reliably shifts an observer's attention toward the indicated location. Pointing makes the direction more explicit.
Experiments show that observers can use the geometry of an outstretched arm, hand, and index finger to identify another person's intended location with fine spatial accuracy, and some research has found pointing to be an especially powerful attentional cue.
Teachers use this constantly because it works. A teacher points at the denominator while explaining a fraction, looks toward a word on the board, circles one phrase, underlines another, changes the color of a term, pauses, and asks the class to look right here. Experimental work shows that teachers' gestures change where students look, can synchronize visual attention with spoken explanation, and can improve learning.
Every successful cue temporarily diminishes the field. The teacher is effectively saying that, of everything available right now, this deserves processing. That is not sinister; it is one of the foundations of education. Efficient instruction necessarily excludes information.
But the same mechanism can influence where inquiry itself is allowed to go. A child begins with a wide field of questions about why something happens, whether it could work differently, or what nobody has tried. A parent or teacher, perhaps tired and managing twenty other demands, redirects the inquiry: that is irrelevant, we are not discussing that, look here, this is the answer, follow the instructions.
No villain is required. Repeated often enough, however, external redirection can become internal redirection. The child may eventually stop asking certain questions before anyone else has to stop them.
That possibility takes us directly back to The Luck Factor. Wiseman's lucky people appear unusually available to information that was not part of the assigned search. Parents, teachers, leaders, partners, institutions, advertisements, ritual specialists, news organizations, algorithms, and social groups all participate in teaching us what deserves salience.
Much of that guidance is necessary and useful; some of it can leave an adult exceptionally skilled at looking exactly where they were taught to look while the £5 note remains three feet away.
The vulnerable strength is therefore not merely the capacity to pay attention. It is the capacity to retain some authority over where attention goes next.
Word Spells: Language Can Be an Action
Magic has always taken words unusually seriously.
Anthropologist Stanley Tambiah's classic work on “the magical power of words” examined ritual speech not simply as descriptive language but as language understood to do something when spoken in the appropriate context. His work helped move anthropology away from treating magical speech as primitive confusion about cause and effect and toward examining language as performance.
We already understand performative language outside magic. “I resign” changes an employment relationship. “I pronounce you married” can change legal and social status when spoken by someone authorized to do so. “You are under arrest” immediately reorganizes attention, behavior, and available choices when spoken under the appropriate circumstances. Words acquire power through combinations of authority, context, expectation, relationship, and consequence.
Baneful speech introduces another possibility. A curse, threat, accusation, prediction, humiliation, or hostile label can become an attentional object whether or not the speaker possesses any supernatural capacity. Repeated statements that terrible things follow someone, that people dislike them, that their perceptions cannot be trusted, or that they will fail at something they deeply value can begin influencing expectation.
Nocebo research gives us a tightly bounded scientific example: negative expectations created through verbal suggestion, previous experience, or social learning can produce measurable changes in symptoms and perception. This does not establish that curses operate through a nocebo mechanism. It establishes something more useful for this inquiry: expectation itself can affect lived experience.
Psalms: Words With Inherited Authority
The use of Psalms in Conjure and Hoodoo makes the power of words more complex. African American Conjure did not simply preserve an untouched African religious system underneath Christianity. Chireau documents a long interaction between Conjure and Christian belief in which biblical material became incorporated into practices concerned with protection, healing, influence, justice, and spiritual power.
A Psalm carries more than lexical content. For a practitioner who regards scripture as sacred, the words can carry inherited authority, memory, communal recognition, cadence, religious meaning, and relationship to God. A random sentence whispered into the air is therefore not culturally equivalent to scripture spoken by someone who believes the words participate in divine authority.
This is also why extracting an isolated Psalm from a tradition can fundamentally change what it is. The mechanism was never merely the text.
Sigils and Seals: Compress the Intention
Humans use symbolic compression constantly. Logos, flags, wedding rings, religious symbols, and political emblems can each carry networks of ideas, memories, allegiances, and emotions far larger than the physical object itself.
A sigil reduces complexity into a mark. Historically, magical sigils and seals often represented particular spiritual beings or powers and appeared in grimoires as parts of much larger ritual systems. Modern occult practice also uses sigil for a graphic representation of an intention, but that usage should not be projected backward onto every historical seal.
For our question, the important mechanism is compression. An elaborate desire, conflict, fear, or intended outcome can be made visually singular. Instead of repeatedly reconstructing an entire interpersonal situation, the practitioner has one mark capable of representing the whole desired result.
A domination sigil represents an especially stark use of that capacity: a complicated human being and an uncertain future are compressed into one desired outcome. That is nearly the inverse of Wiseman's lucky orientation, which requires enough openness for outcomes that were not fully specified in advance to become relevant.
The Larger Ceremony: When the Mechanisms Converge
Some magical traditions go far beyond a single object, phrase, or gesture. In larger ceremonies, the mechanisms we have examined separately can converge around one intention.
Ceremonies may combine specialist knowledge, prescribed timing, preparation, sacred language, scent, rhythm, costume, fasting, music, repetition, bodily movement, unusual environments, social roles, invocations, and carefully sequenced actions. Archaeologists and anthropologists studying ritual materiality emphasize that ritual efficacy, as understood by practitioners, frequently depends upon relationships among substances, tools, sounds, smells, words, bodies, and procedural knowledge rather than upon one isolated “magic object.”
In baneful work, that convergence can organize an extraordinary amount of attention around another person and a desired adverse outcome. The target can be named, represented, spoken about, visualized, symbolically constrained, and repeatedly associated with the same intention while sound, movement, objects, timing, and ritual authority reinforce the act.
From the perspective of The Luck Factor, there is an irony here. The ceremony may be intended to narrow the target's possibilities, but the most certain attentional effect occurs among the people performing it: they have constructed an environment in which the target becomes exceptionally difficult to ignore.
Why Domination Appears So Often Under Oppression
Magical traditions have never belonged only to oppressed people. Rulers, soldiers, merchants, lovers, athletes, gamblers, litigants, and political elites have all sought supernatural assistance. Oppression nevertheless changes the practical meaning of magical agency.
A person with access to conventional power may be able to hire lawyers, exercise property rights, call officials, terminate employment, travel freely, spend money, publish accusations, invoke social status, or physically protect themselves. When those routes are closed, dangerous, or controlled by somebody else, indirect power becomes more important.
Under slavery, Conjure could offer forms of protection, healing, influence, retaliation, prediction, and psychological autonomy within a system explicitly designed to deny autonomy. Scholarship on Hoodoo and Conjure repeatedly connects these traditions to survival, social influence, protection, resistance, healing, and the negotiation of power under extreme inequality.
That history helps explain why domination can appear beside protection. Someone who cannot directly influence an overseer, employer, landowner, violent partner, official, or other powerful figure may seek another route to affect that person's behavior.
The same technologies can also be directed horizontally or downward, toward lovers, rivals, neighbors, competitors, or people with less power. Human beings do not use power only for noble reasons simply because the technology emerged under difficult circumstances.
Traditional Warnings Were Part of the Technology
One thing modern social-media magic often strips away is the warning label. Across cultures, serious ritual practices have been embedded to varying degrees in relationships with teachers, specialists, elders, clergy, initiatory systems, inherited traditions, religious prohibitions, ritual obligations, and community knowledge. Ancient Mediterranean curse tablets, for example, could be commissioned from specialists or produced by less specialized users, so there was never one universal model of expertise.
Baneful work was nevertheless rarely conceptually neutral. Different cultures developed ideas about retaliation, spiritual contamination, divine judgment, reciprocal consequences, dangerous spirits, ritual impurity, community sanctions, legal punishment, and the possibility that a working could rebound or create consequences beyond the practitioner's control.
There is also a consequence visible through the attentional framework we have been developing. Trying to dominate another person can make the practitioner's own attention revolve around that person.
Repeatedly watching for signs that the working succeeded, wondering whether counter-work has occurred, interpreting subsequent events, anticipating retaliation, and deciding what must happen next can make the intended target increasingly central to the practitioner's own life.
The intended captor can become captured by the same object of attention. From the perspective of The Luck Factor, spending months or years organizing attention, expectation, emotion, and behavior around someone you hate could itself become a remarkably unlucky condition.
Luck Can Be Worked for Someone, Too
The opposite intention appears just as persistently. Humans bless one another, pray for safe journeys, carry talismans, make offerings, invoke divine favor, and perform rituals for prosperity, health, fertility, success, protection, victory, favorable relationships, and open roads.
Often the intention is not simply to manufacture one random stroke of good fortune. It is to improve the conditions under which favorable events can occur.
That is strikingly compatible with The Luck Factor. Wiseman's lucky person does not control randomness; they increase their contact with possibility.
Attachment May Be One of the Oldest Luck Advantages
This is where secure attachment becomes relevant. Attachment theory's idea of a secure base is explicitly connected to exploration. In adult relationship research, Brooke Feeney and colleagues found that availability, encouragement, and noninterference from a partner supported exploratory behavior.
Imagine two children approaching something unfamiliar. One has learned that curiosity is generally permitted, support is available if needed, and mistakes do not threaten the relationship. The other has learned that exploration may produce ridicule, withdrawal, alarm, punishment, or emotional chaos. Neither child knows what lies on the other side, but their cost of finding out is different.
That difference can matter years later. Secure attachment does not guarantee good fortune, but security can leave more attention available for the environment because less of it must be continuously devoted to protecting the attachment itself. That creates room for exactly the behaviors Wiseman finds interesting: meeting people, exploring unfamiliar territory, trying things, noticing what appears, and recovering when an encounter goes badly.
The Unlucky State Comes First
This is why I think The Luck Factor becomes more interesting after asking how attention is diminished. An unlucky state is not simply sadness or pessimism; it can be a condition in which enormous amounts of attention are already committed to one person, one unanswered question, one grievance, one anticipated catastrophe, one group's judgment, one news cycle, or one desperately desired outcome.
The person may be functioning at a very high level while moving through an increasingly narrow world. Exhaustion can tighten that aperture further. A sixty-hour workweek plus commuting, relationship uncertainty, caregiving, financial pressure, conflict, inadequate rest, or pain does not leave the same cognitive resources available for exploration as a well-supported life with time, sleep, money, and emotional safety.
This is one reason I distrust comparisons of human reactions. The visible stimulus is only one layer of the load.
Scapegoating Can Make Somebody Unlucky in the Material World
Sometimes another person or group really does narrow someone's available world. Scapegoating can concentrate a complex problem onto one person, and experimental research has found that blame can help restore a sense of control when people face threatening or difficult-to-explain outcomes.
Once a group decides that one person is the problem, a smear campaign can turn that judgment into a shared reputation. Gossip, insinuation, selective information, repeated labels, and stories stripped of context can shape what other people expect to see before they have even encountered the target themselves. Ambiguous behavior is then more likely to be interpreted through the reputation already in circulation.
Behavior changes accordingly. Information may be withheld, invitations disappear, mistakes become character evidence, neutral actions acquire suspicious meaning, and people may distance themselves because affiliation itself has become socially costly.
The target now has objectively fewer opportunities. Their luck has been altered in the material world. A besmirched reputation can close roads.
That is one reason magical traditions concerned with reputation, separation, confusion, domination, crossing, and road closing are anthropologically interesting. They name outcomes humans can recognize regardless of how we explain their cause.
Then The Luck Factor Turns the Whole Structure Around
By the time we return to Wiseman, his lucky people look considerably more interesting. They are not merely cheerful; they are difficult to fix. They remain socially mobile, resist turning one bad event into a prophecy about every future event, notice information outside the assigned task, and permit unexpected people and events to become relevant.
Most importantly, they continue behaving in ways that keep chance in circulation.
Luck therefore requires some uncertainty. If I already know exactly what everyone will do, how the opportunity must arrive, what the outcome must look like, and what every setback means, the aperture is already closing. The lucky position is not empty-headed optimism. It is the recognition that there is more information here than I currently possess.
That leaves the future alive.
I Tried It
I realized recently that I had organized much of my recovery around integrity. I wanted truth, coherence, accurate responsibility, and clarity, and those were useful organizing principles.
Luck asks a different question: What else might happen?
I tried behaving as though something interesting or favorable might appear without deciding what it had to be. I noticed a yellow butterfly and then a Rolls-Royce.
Neither observation demonstrates anything supernatural, and neither needed to. What interested me was how quickly my search field had changed.
Later, while discussing attachment, I remembered that I already have a trove of older attachment blogs and half-developed material that can become new work. That opportunity existed before the luck experiment; I simply had not been counting it as luck.
Perhaps that is exactly Wiseman's point.
What I Am Taking From The Luck Factor
The anthropological record tells us that humans have invested astonishing effort in changing fortune through blessings and curses, protective and hostile objects, prayers, bindings, containers, seals, incantations, divination systems, ceremonies, and road-opening traditions. The psychology of luck adds an unexpectedly practical question: what if one of the most consequential things anyone can capture is your attention, because attention influences which possibilities ever become behavior?
Becoming luckier may begin partly with recovering the ability to move attention, not by ignoring danger, denying loss, or manufacturing cheerful explanations for everything that happens, but by regaining enough freedom to look somewhere else when looking somewhere else becomes useful. The Luck Factor becomes much more interesting from that perspective.
It is not simply a book about people who seem to catch more breaks; it is an examination of the habits that keep human beings available to chance, novelty, connection, intuition, and opportunity. After looking across the many ways attention can be captured, narrowed, directed, synchronized, fixed, or consumed, that availability begins to look less like a personality quirk and more like a form of freedom.
The world may contain far more possibility than any of us can perceive at once. Luck requires leaving enough of the aperture open to find out.
