The Luck I Didn’t Recognise
The Luck I Didn’t Recognise
Sometimes the thing that changes your life is the thing you most want to escape.
When I look back at my life, I sometimes wonder how much of it was planned.
The honest answer is: very little.
There were decisions, of course. There were moments when I chose one road instead of another. But many of the things that changed my life came from circumstances I had not chosen.
Some were good.
Some were painful.
And some were so painful at the time that I could never have imagined they would eventually lead me somewhere else.
I think of the early seventies.
I was a young man in Sri Lanka, and the country I knew as Ceylon had changed.
The easy confidence of my childhood had gone.
There was a feeling among young people that the country was becoming smaller, more uncertain and less welcoming. Opportunities seemed to depend increasingly on who you were, what religion you were born into, what language you spoke, where you came from and, sometimes, on circumstances over which you had no control.
I was young enough to feel the unfairness of it, but not old enough to understand the politics behind it.
I only knew that I did not like what was happening.
I felt earmarked.
I felt discriminated against.
And I wanted to get away.
At that age, you don’t use sophisticated words for these things.
You simply know that you don’t belong somewhere anymore.
You want to leave.
I didn’t leave for adventure
When people hear that I went to Dubai as a young man, they sometimes imagine an adventurous young traveller looking for a better life.
It wasn’t quite like that.
I wasn’t sitting in Colombo dreaming about the desert.
I wasn’t looking for an exotic experience.
I wanted to escape the persecution and discrimination I felt around me.
Dubai became an exit.
That was all it needed to be.
I didn’t know then that an escape route could also become the beginning of a new life.
I only knew that there was a possibility of leaving.
So I took it.
And that decision changed almost everything.
The strange thing about luck
We normally think of luck as something pleasant.
Winning something.
Meeting someone.
Getting a promotion.
Finding money when you need it.
But there is another kind of luck.
Sometimes luck comes disguised as misfortune.
Sometimes you are pushed out of one place and, only years later, realise that being pushed was the best thing that could have happened to you.
If I had not been earmarked as a young man…
If I had not felt discriminated against…
If I had felt comfortable and secure about my future in Sri Lanka…
Perhaps I would never have gone to Dubai.
And if I had never gone to Dubai, the rest of my life might have been completely different.
Dubai
I arrived in Dubai at a remarkable time.
The city was changing.
There were buildings rising from what still seemed, in places, to be desert.
People were arriving from everywhere.
The old Dubai was slowly becoming something new.
And I was there.
Not because I had carefully calculated that this was the right moment to build a career.
I was there because I wanted to escape.
That distinction mattered to me.
The young man who left Sri Lanka did not know he was walking into an opportunity.
He thought he was walking away from a problem.
Sometimes you only understand the direction of your life when you have travelled far enough to turn around and look back.
The telex machine
In Dubai, I found myself working with a telex machine.
It was a strange piece of technology to become important in my life.
Messages came through with their mechanical rhythm.
Click.
Pause.
Click.
The world arriving in strips of paper.
I became fascinated by it.
Technology was beginning to change the way businesses communicated, and I happened to be standing close enough to notice.
Again, I was in the right place at the right time.
I didn’t know it.
I was simply doing my job.
But the telex machine became another door.
Then came banking.
Then computers.
Then a career that took me further into technology.
Looking back now, I can see the chain.
Sri Lanka pushed me towards Dubai.
Dubai put me near technology.
Technology led me towards banking and computing.
And one thing led to another.
It is tempting to call that a plan.
It wasn’t.
It was a series of accidents connected by hindsight.
The people who appeared
There were people along the way who changed the direction of my life.
Some were friends.
Some were colleagues.
Some said something to me in passing and probably forgot the conversation before the day was over.
I didn’t.
That is another form of luck.
Meeting the right person at the right moment.
Hearing the right sentence.
Being introduced to the right opportunity.
Being curious enough to ask one more question.
We rarely know when these moments are happening.
Australia
Years later, I would make another enormous decision.
Australia.
By then I had a family.
Leaving was no longer simply about me.
There were children to think about.
There was uncertainty.
There was the question every migrant asks before leaving one country for another:
Will we be all right?
I didn’t know.
But I went.
And Australia became home.
Once again, I had stepped into something I could not fully see.
The writer I became
Even becoming a writer happened almost by accident.
I had spent most of my life working.
Then came a time when I began looking backwards.
The memories were still there.
School.
My parents.
Friends.
Girls.
Aquinas.
Dubai.
The telex machine.
Banking.
Australia.
Family.
The things I had lost.
The people I had forgotten and then remembered.
I began writing them down.
One story became another.
Then another.
Eventually there were hundreds.
And I began to understand something.
I wasn’t really writing about the past.
I was trying to understand how I had arrived at the present.
Right place, right time
People sometimes say that success is about being in the right place at the right time.
I believe that.
But I would add something.
Sometimes you are in the right place for reasons that, at the time, feel completely wrong.
I was in Dubai because I wanted to escape Sri Lanka.
That was the truth.
I didn’t go there because I knew it would lead to a career.
I didn’t know what the future held.
I simply wanted a way out.
Yet that escape put me in the path of opportunities I could never have imagined.
And perhaps that is the strangest form of luck.
To be pushed towards a door you would never have thought to open.
Looking back
I cannot say that everything that happened to me was good.
It wasn’t.
There were disappointments.
There were difficult years.
There were people who left.
There were decisions I would make differently.
There were moments when I wondered whether I had chosen correctly.
But life is not judged one moment at a time.
You have to look at the whole thing.
And when I look back now, I see how many apparently unrelated events were connected.
The young boy in Sri Lanka.
The boy who was abused at a Christian institute at fourteen.
The young man who felt he was being earmarked and discriminated against.
The young lad who was earmarked as a nuisance by seniors during his apprentice days in Sri Lanka.
The young man who wanted only to escape.
The fellow who arrived in Dubai.
The telex operator.
The banker.
The technologist.
The migrant.
The father.
The grandfather.
And eventually, the old man sitting down to write it all.
They are all the same person.
Me.
I used to think I was lucky because of the opportunities that came my way.
Now I think I was lucky much earlier.
I was lucky because circumstances forced me to move.
If I had been completely comfortable in Sri Lanka, I might never have left.
If I had never left, I might never have found Dubai.
If I had never found Dubai, I might never have discovered technology in the way I did.
And if those things had not happened, there would probably be a very different story to tell.
So perhaps luck is not always about getting what you want.
Sometimes it is about being denied something you thought you needed.
Sometimes it is about being pushed out of a place before you are ready.
Sometimes it is about running away.
And sometimes, without knowing it, you run straight towards the life that was waiting for you.
I did not know any of this when I left Sri Lanka.
I only knew that I wanted to escape.
Many decades later, I can finally see it differently.
I was not running towards Dubai.
I was running away from something.
And somehow, I ended up exactly where I needed to be.
Written by Denzil Jayasinghe
Tech professional with an artist’s eye and a storyteller’s instinct. I captu
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