For my weekly writing spot on this site, see the One-Minute Mystic, with a new meditation posted every Monday. Also see The Village, the story of Misty Longings, England's most beautiful village, posted episode by episode earlier this year.       As EB White said, "Luck is not something you mention in the presence of self-made men." The rest of us though, can honestly admit that the Good Lady will once again play a big part in our lives this year. In the West, and against all the evidence, we tend to attribute success and failure to personal behaviour. We work on the assumption that if someone achieves something, it's largely down to their personal gifts or qualities. But most success and failure is due to forces way beyond our personal control; to 'events, dear boy, events!' as Harold Macmillan once said. Some claim that Gordon Brown has been saved by the recession, just as Thatcher was saved by the Falklands War, and the faltering reputation of Churchill redeemed by Hitler. Crisis is always good news for someone. Events, dear boy, events! Success and failure are granted in fickle fashion. Our success, for instance, may simply be due to our being flavour of the month; right place, right time; or to a patron single-handedly scooping us from obscurity to status; or to the group around us who help our particular skills to be well displayed. In Japan, knowing this, they tend to credit groups rather than individuals. But in the West, we are still wedded to the idea that where you are, you deserve to be; that somehow, there is an inevitability and rounded justice in where you find yourself – applauded or looked down upon. The successful have their own reward, and who would grudge them that? But failures also can be happy. For the wonderful thing about failure is the way it draws people to us in a way our success can never do. Think of the choking rage caused by those circulars which come our way at Christmas, in which a friend or relation relentlessly chronicles yet another amazing year of achievement. At best, we throw it quickly away, and allow the disdain to pass through us; at worst, our contempt chills and congeals within; or we find ourselves planning retaliatory gestures in the post next year. Success is like that – it creates distance. In contrast, reflect on the empathy which streams through your soul, when someone tells you of a weakness succumbed to; or of a dream murdered by circumstance. Far from feeling distance, you are for a moment one with them in solidarity. Failure is like that – it's inviting, vulnerable and winning. Was Jesus ever more wonderfully mistaken than when on the cross he screamed out "My God, my God – why have you forsaken me?" The late Jonas Salk, who developed the polio vaccine, took us even further into the mystery, when he told a friend, "I'm rebuilding my life out of the ashes of success." Instead of aching to get back there, he felt he was trying to recover from it. So this year's slings and arrows of outrageous fortune – whether exalting or killing – may cloud our skies for a moment; for Lady Luck is like that. But the sky behind is blue – always blue. More writings © Simon Parke