Do you ever have one of those days when you wake up, and as you go about your daily routine it suddenly strikes you how very, very lucky you are?
Today was one of those days. Nothing special happened; I dropped off Matthew at school, had to go to work, etc. But as I kissed Rebecca goodbye for the day and got into the car with my son, I was suddenly struck by the revelation of how many people in the world have never achieved what I have.
A boring middle-class job, two great kids, a cute little dog, and a loving wife is not the kind of “life of significance” that gets written up in newspapers or glorified in the movies, but do you really need any more out of life than that?
Personally, I don’t think so. I’ve grown up in a first-world nation, I’ve found the love of my life, I have enough to get by financially, and my kids are not brats. I’ll probably never make the newspapers, but I think, in the end, that I don’t care. There are plenty of people who have become rich and famous but who never attained some of the simple things.
That really sounds absolutely wonderful. It’s scary though that we don’t realize just what we have often enough. Anyone who has read your home page knows how lucky you are, Mike. It’s difficult I guess to take a step back from the daily struggle and go “Holy shit, I’m living the American (Canadian) dream.” Maybe some people think that dream is to become rich. That’s not true. The American dream is the pursuit and ultimate achievement of happiness while causing as little harm to others as possible. It isn’t easy but you did it and for that, you deserve exactly what you have.
Every day. I’m engaged to the perfect woman, I have a steady guaranteed job so we can plan our future, and despite a reckless youth I’m relatively undinged and still in pretty good health. Happy to be alive with a good future in front of us and there’s nothing I can realistically complain about. There are times when I go “this is too good, I must be dreaming…”, but it’s real, and I feel like the luckiest bastard in the world.