Aren't We Lucky!

Posted originally 2/3/14

     Every once in a while I consider how lucky we are.  When it's clear at night, I look out up at the  sky, consider the vastness of it, and think as far as we know, we are the only ones that get to experience this.

Life.  Concious life.  All the joy, all the pain.  Both are a part of it.

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     There are those that don't believe in luck, but really, how else do you define it?  Forget about religion for a moment.  How many religions there are, is really icing on the cake.  We cannot deny the existence of one another, regardless of how different we may be.  However, our commonality is this: we live on 1 out of 8 planets around our sun, which by the estimate I found in an entry by Ethan Siegel on Science Blogs, is 1 of between 2-4 hundred billion stars in the Milky Way.  Naturally begs the question, "out of how many planets in the Milky Way?"  Mr. Siegel does the approximate math for us, (thank goodness) and after stating that it's a naive guess, divulges, 2-3 trillion planets, in the Milky Way.  Nobody knows about the Snickers or the Zagnut galaxies.  Yet.
     So again, I say, "aren't we lucky?"  I don't say this to be a Pollyanna; or to trivialize the tradgedies and sadness that we each experience; or the troubles our planet faces.  I often find the precariousness and the senselessness of it all overwhelming.  I state it as an obvious truth that goes along with the darker truths.  Still, since this is a truth, it gives me hope, to recognize these truths:

We get to wake up. To breathe. To walk.  
We get to comfort a friend.  
We get to cry.  
We get to decide.
We get to witness.
We get to laugh.
We get to connect.
We can ponder whether to carry on the hurt, or say it's ends with me.
We get to dream; and wonder what it all means.

  I end this with a quote from one of my favorite authors, that I found on the post by Mr. Siegel:

“Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.” -Ray Bradbury

The followups~

Again, Aren't We Lucky

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