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The Luck Dynamic
What faces one person turns its back on another
- Yoruba Proverb
Luck plays an important part in our lives.
Proud people tend to discountenance it. Simple-minded people are over reliant on it. Religious people may call it grace or favour. It may pass pessimists by unnoticed — in whatever form it presents itself to us, and in whatever form we embrace it, luck is always around us. It is always happening.
15th December 2021, I’d arrived early at the domestic terminal of the airport to catch a 5pm flight to my hometown of Akure. It’d been a while since I saw my mother, and that weekend offered a window of opportunity to spend some time with this phenomenal woman. I’d completed the pre-boarding rituals rather quickly with 40 minutes to spare. Headphones plugged in, I bobbed my head to Jay Z’s Squeeze on repeat and watched the crowd — my all-time favourite pastime.
For an architect and writer, watching the crowd is a vocation. It is how I understand the many things that are unsaid about my humanity. Indeed, in many ways, it is how I understand myself. Behind each face I see, it is the realization that that person has a story I don’t know yet. That there is something they are running to, and something they are running away from. And in that moment of watching the crowd, it…
