Lucky? Who me?

You might think, given the title of this blog, that you're likely to find these lines filled with tales of good fortune -- winning lottery tickets, parking places just where they're needed, unforeseen windfalls of not very hard-earned dollars.

Would that that were so.

The truth is that my life is much like many others -- too much stress, too little sleep; too much anxiety, not enough certainty; too much sadness, not enough joy. In fact, the very idea of chronicling these thoughts came on the heels of a season of nearly unbearable grief, a season that thankfully has finally begun to recede a bit into a past that remains unforgettable, yet less painfully remembered.

So what makes me so lucky? What gives me the audacity to call myself the luckiest man?

There's my wife, of course. A godsend to me, and an absolute rock-solid blessing to the other things that make me lucky -- my children. You're sure to hear more about them later.

But these are so obvious as to seem like platitudes, and like all platitudes, they are easily stated, and less easily felt. It's the other that I hope to discover in these posts, the things that should convince me -- should convince us all -- that no matter what we feel about our lives at any given moment, we are, in fact, the luckiest men and women on the face of the earth.

Such insight isn't easily gained, and I fear that I've nearly lost my capacity to see them at all. So, in the end, maybe this is an exercise for me, an attempt to rediscover the luck that's already there, that surrounds me each day in ways I've just grown to jaded to see.

Maybe you'll see it, too. Maybe you'll see it before I do. If that's the case, I hope you'll be kind enough to point it out to me. I can use all the help I can get.