Dear Readers,  

I have always been called a bit of a lateral thinker by those who know me and, with your permission I would like to contributes some of my thoughts to LPG’s pages, starting with this one…  

I was watching television one morning recently. I usually do this with my first morning cup of tea because it keeps me company and brings me up to date with what is going on in the world, although I admit to not taking that much notice.  However, every now and then, one of the short items catches your interest and for me, one morning not so long ago it was the introduction of one of the recent television competition winners who was being interviewed.  

They asked the couple about how life had change since their win but I stopped listening at that point.  I found myself focussed on how lucky there were but were they?  

That thought must have been playing on my mind because a little later I took a look at some online statistics and found that 72% of us brits believe in luck.  I have to say that I am not sure that I am one of them.  I am not a pessimist and being at the right place at the right time is a concept that I can relate to but I think that there is more to it than that.  

I found myself asking if we are also affected by fate and destiny, or if indeed we make our own luck.  I suppose that we have to look back on our lives to work out which of these three phenomena has been most influential but doing that can leave you with one of only two answers.  

You can choose to dwell on what has gone wrong over the years; those things that you might feel changed the course of your life, and there are also those times when you were forced to make a choice which, with hindsight, you might have not gone for.  But this just leads to regret and it is always worth remembering that just one decision might have completely altered the person you have become for the better, but it could also have made things worse.  

Is that fate is I ask myself? Blaming the negative aspects of your life on the fact that you did not make better decisions in the past can leave you questioning everything and that is no good in your life and that is a slippery slope to negativity; a place where you can get seriously stuck in depression unless you are really happy with where you are. 


Perhaps you err on the side of destiny.  You are where you are supposed to be and there is a stronger force in charge of that.  I have to say that we appear to have a bit too much wiggle room for the theory to be completely true, although taking the determinist view will get you off the hook if things are currently going a bit pear shaped in your life at the moment.  In short, if you cite destiny as the reason for where you are today, at least you do not have to take all the blame if you could be happier. 

Or do you think that you make your own fate and are you happy with how you are now 

If not perhaps, the question is how you see your future; after all, it is the biggest question on everyone’s mind.   

Perhaps you believe that these anomalies have played a hand in your life but having done all the lateral thinking I can muster on this subject I believe that we humans are best advised to focus on the one variable that all our past encounters with luck, faith and destiny have in common.   

Most of what we have learned about how our encounters with each of these arguable cosmic forces can only be judged by the subjective experience in each life they have touched and what has happened so far has little baring on what will happen in the days, months and years to come. 

So let me suggest that we put our focus there as I introduce a forth word at this point and wish all readers good fortune for the future…  

WT, Downham.