I've been keeping myself busy with thinking about luck, yet once again. (Although probably using an active phrase here is not quite accurate, and the passive form might be more appropriate: I've been kept busy; but that's another story.) More precisely, I've been wondering on the (grammatical) tense of luck, in other words: do we ever experience luck in the presence, or is it rather something we experience retroactively or prospectively, thinking "I was happy that moment, but I only realized that I was later on", or else: "I think/hope/know I'll be happy one day, under such and such circumstances, when this and that will happen". Maybe it is like in every (good) story, where most of the events gain their importance only in the light of things that follow, or in the light of things that went before. The presence of luck is thus something that is always divided, something experienced against the background of things that were or things to come.
On an even broader scope, you might ask yourself if we can ever really experience presence, or the present. The time span of the present is an instant, or rather: the blink of an eye (interestingly enough, German has a different word for instant: the look of an eye, instead of a blink). The funny or weird thing about the notion "blink of an eye" being that you cannot really experience it. Most of the time, our brain blanks out this precise moment - the blink - (and when you consciously concentrate on the blinking, you don't see anything during the blink, of course), constructing a treacherous continuity of consciousness and thus time, we perceive time as a flow rather than a succession of cut-into-pieces moments. Come to think about it, maybe photography is a more accurate "representation" of our life and ourselves after all, in comparison to movies (which is just the short version for moving images, thus moving instants). With all its constructedness, the capturing of one single, subjective, constricted moment might actually be the closet we can get to our perception of the present.
"... nous nes sommes pas assez subtils pour apercevoir l'écoulement probablement absolu du devenir; le permanent n'existe que grâce à nos organes grossiers qui résument et ramènent les choses à des plans communs, alors que rien n'existe sous cette frome. L'arbre est à chaque instant une chose neuve; nous affirmons la forme parce que nous ne saisissons pas la subtilité d'un mouvement absolu."
Friedrich Nietzsche
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