5 Years since I finished school. It's very hard to think of what to write here when so much has happened and there are so many approaches I could take. Life keeps getting better. However hard I try to see it any other way, I can't help but think of myself as lucky. Very lucky. But wait a minute, what is luck?

I think luck is the recognition of yourself as hypothetically being in a worse position should things have gone another way. Things that aren't directly influenced by yourself. Noone really deserves to be lucky, yet somehow everyone deserves to have luck. Perhaps people just deserve to be lucky by the same amount. But if that were the case, then luck wouldn't exist, since luck is about something exceptional, something that results in an outcome that you view as being different, uplifting. But then perhaps luck doesn't exist; perhaps it is just given a presence by man. Actually, you could call man's existence itself 'lucky'; the result of random processes and events 'happening' to co-incide. Or maybe you see it as design, or fate, things that 'happen for a reason' or have been created. I don't think these two approaches are so different.

Let me explain. On the one hand you see things as being 'lucky', and on the other 'designed' or perhaps 'fate'. The lucky person recognises that they are lucky, because things randomly happen in their favour. Fine. But if they really did happen randomly, then they wouldn't matter: it's only because they effect that person in a positive way that they are noticed. It is the act of mindfully noticing things that makes luck. And if they don't notice them, then would not have been lucky or thankful for their luck. Who is to say what the threshold of significance should be for the discovery of luck? Now take the person who sees things as happening for a reason. This time they see things as created with purpose, and accept that everything happens by design. In effect, they see something significant, and inside themselves believe that it happened for some reason. That reason is often something positive, an idea of something better to come, or simply an appreciation of what happened that made things better.

Either way, the two approaches meet an eerily similar conclusion. Not only in the act of making an otherwise insignificant event important, but more amazingly, in the person's appreciation, or thanks. So we see how the human mind is able to make something significant from a supposed nothing, and not only that, feel a strange natural impulse to give thanks. I believe this is one of the roots of religion, is buried deep in the human psyche, and makes us stand out from other animals in an amazing way. We can't help but give thanks, for 'something', to 'something'. This is surely a re-assuring and incredible notion. Now remembering that luck, or discovery of fate, stem from recognition of that something. Trust me, because I know, it is possible for the mind to meet that recognition in anything. Anything at all, from, yes, the existence of our planet, right down to that smell of countryside air that meets your nose for the first time in so long you could almost swear you were born to appreciate it. And when you can appreciate anything, you can give thanks for anything, and you can feel lucky, about everything. And the moment you realise you can feel lucky about and therefore give thanks for almost everything, life takes on a whole new dimension...