Luck

If you keep walking back from good luck, he thought, you'll come to bad luck.

This paragraph from Gary Paulsen's Hatchet threw me for a loop (or, maybe, took me aback).

I tend to think about luck favoring the prepared mind, or being simply a matter of circumstance, but never have I thought of an instance of good luck being able to trace itself back directly to an instance of bad luck.

I wonder if it works with success as well? Instances of success are almost always preceded by instances of failure, and sometimes you only need one instance of success to make a profound difference in your life, as in conceiving a child.

There are also instances of good luck that are not easily traceable to instances of bad luck like happening upon an old friend in an unlikely place, coming upon a particular combination of notes and rhythms that work in a piece, happening to turn on the radio or television at the right time to see or hear something, or finding an thought-provoking passage in a book to write a blogpost about.