A Baby Opossum Named Fern Made Me Question Everything I Thought I Knew About Luck

I drive animals for a living.

That's the short version. The longer version is that I run a pet transportation company in Los Angeles, which means most of my days involve fairly ordinary things — a dog going to the groomer, a cat going to a new apartment across town, the kind of errands that don't usually leave you thinking about fate.

Then a woman called me about a baby opossum named Fern.

She'd found him at a park. Not looking for him, not out looking to rescue anything that day — just walking, the way people walk through parks every day without incident, without expecting the day to ask anything of them. And there he was. Small, distressed, clearly not okay, clearly not going to be okay on his own.

Most people keep walking. I don't say that as a criticism. Most people have somewhere to be, and most people, if they're honest, don't know what to do with a distressed wild animal even if they wanted to help. She didn't keep walking. She called around, found a wildlife rehabilitation center willing to take him, and then called me to actually get him there.

I picked up Fern, drove him to the rehab center, and did what I do. But the whole drive, I couldn't stop turning something over in my head. Was this luck? Was it something else? And what does it actually mean when this kind of thing keeps happening — to her, to me, to anyone who seems to keep crossing paths with creatures that need help right at the moment they need it?

The question that wouldn't leave me alone

I told her, at the time, that she was lucky. That nature had chosen her. That there's no such thing as coincidence, not really, and that being the one who happened to walk past a suffering creature and actually stop — out of every person who could have walked that same path that day — meant something.

I believe that. But I want to sit with it more carefully than I did in the moment, because "lucky" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and I'm not sure it's the whole truth.

Here's the thing about encountering a distressed animal that needs your help. It doesn't feel lucky in the moment. It feels like an interruption. An inconvenience, even, if you're being honest — you weren't planning on rearranging your afternoon around a baby opossum. There's nothing about the experience itself that resembles winning something. It resembles being handed a small, urgent responsibility you didn't ask for.

So if it's not luck in the conventional sense — the sense where something good happens to you without cost or effort — what is it?

What the old traditions actually say

Across a lot of spiritual and folk traditions, encountering a distressed or injured animal isn't filed under luck or misfortune at all. It's filed under something closer to a summons. The animal isn't a sign that good things are coming your way, and it isn't an omen of bad things either. It's an invitation — a specific, immediate, non-negotiable invitation to prove something about who you actually are when nobody's watching and nothing's in it for you.

In a lot of indigenous and folk frameworks, animals that cross your path in distress are understood as carrying a kind of test embedded in the encounter itself. Not a test administered by the animal, obviously — the opossum wasn't scheming. A test built into the structure of the moment. You were there. It was there. What happens next says something true about you that almost nothing else in an ordinary day would have the chance to reveal.

This reframes the whole "lucky or unlucky" question, because it suggests the wrong axis entirely. It's not about whether the encounter benefits you. It's about whether you rise to what the encounter is quietly asking of you.

Why some people keep meeting the animals that need them

This is the part of your question I keep coming back to, because I think it's the real question underneath the luck question. If this keeps happening to someone — if she's not the first person I've picked up an animal for who says some version of "this always seems to happen to me" — what does that actually mean?

I don't think it means she's lucky in the sense of being rewarded. I think it means something closer to this: people who are the kind of person who stops, who makes the call, who doesn't just keep walking — those people become, over time, more visible to exactly the situations that require that specific quality in them. Not because the universe is running some kind of point system. Because attention creates its own gravity. The person who has proven, once, twice, a dozen times, that she'll actually do something about a suffering creature becomes, in some way that's hard to fully explain but easy to notice if you're paying attention, the kind of person these moments keep finding.

Call it energy if that word works for you. Call it pattern recognition running below conscious awareness — maybe she notices distressed animals faster than someone who's never stopped for one, because some part of her brain has learned that noticing is worth doing. Call it whatever framework makes sense to you. But the pattern itself is real, and it's not random.

So — lucky or unlucky?

I think the honest answer is neither, and I think both words are actually too small for what's happening.

Unlucky implies something bad happened to her. Nothing bad happened to her. A small, defenseless creature needed help, and for reasons that have nothing to do with luck, she was the one standing there when it mattered, and she did the harder thing instead of the easier thing.

Lucky implies she won something. She didn't win anything, not in the way we usually mean that word. She spent money. She spent time. She interrupted her day for a creature that will never know her name or thank her in any way she'll ever witness.

What she actually got, I think, is something closer to confirmation. A quiet, specific confirmation of exactly who she already is — the kind of person who doesn't walk past what's suffering, even when walking past would cost her nothing and stopping costs her something real.

Fern made it to the rehabilitation center. He's got a real chance now, because a stranger in a park decided a baby opossum's survival was worth the inconvenience of caring.

I still think there's no such thing as coincidence. I just don't think the word for what happened to her is luck. I think the word is closer to recognition — nature, or fate, or whatever you want to call the pattern underneath things, recognizing exactly who was standing there, and trusting her with it.

She was right to answer that call. And if this keeps happening to you too — if you keep finding yourself standing exactly where a suffering creature happens to be — I don't think you're unlucky, and I don't think you're simply lucky either.

I think you're being trusted. Repeatedly. On purpose.

That's a different thing than luck. It might be a better thing.