Lucky Heather

I don't like to get overly philosophical but the reality is; I’m a lucky girl. That fact has occurred to me before, but it’s never popped into my mind at the same time that my blog has, at least not until now. Anyway, it’s the truth, I’m lucky.

I was born a healthy baby girl in 1989. I spent my first fifteen years living in Columbus, Ohio not having a care in the world other than not falling off my bicycle, and getting the occasional decent grade in school. I not only always had enough food to eat, but I always received gifts every Christmas. My mother, father, and even my brother are relatively normal people. There’s never been any need for anger management in the family. There is no insanity. None have a criminal record. For all those things to be true there just had to be a lot of luck. More luck than most people would realize, that is, if they bothered to give it any thought. I could have been born in China. Worse, I could have been born in China in 1845. I probably would have worked the rice paddies, had six children, and died at the age of fifty-two, a toothless, arthritic woman. And that’s if everything went well. Worst case scenario is that I would have been born a month premature and died before taking a breath.

I might have been born in what is now Nigeria in the year 600 A.D. To tell you the truth, I can’t even give you an inkling of what that life would have been like. I’m sure my childhood would have been worse than it was in a middle class neighborhood in Columbus in the late 1990s.

I live in Chicago now and when there is congested traffic I will sometimes get stuck at the same stop light for more than one cycle. It makes me mad. It makes me mad that I have to sit in complete comfort within an air-conditioned car for an extra forty-five seconds. Can you believe that? I ought to be ashamed of myself.

Out of all the human beings who ever lived on the planet, what percentage had all of the follow, #1; born with perfect health, #2; born into at least modest affluence, #3; born in an industrialized nation, and finally #4; born since the development of vaccines and antibiotics? Is it one person in a thousand? Is it one person in every ten thousand?

See, that is why I never bother playing the Illinois lottery. I’ve already won the lottery, whether I stop to appreciate it or not.