“Luck” Takes Hard Work

By Susan Tweit

“You are so lucky,” wrote a reader in response to one of my recent columns. “Most people don’t live life in the full way you do.”

My initial response was cranky.

It’s hard to see the “lucky” in Richard’s brain cancer, and his second brain surgery in the past eleven months. (And in the radiation and intensive chemotherapy he weathered in between the two surgeries.) It’s very hard to see the lucky in the pathology report on the latest tumors: Grade 4, as bad as brain cancer gets, with a prognosis I have no wish to invoke.

It’s hard to see the lucky in my mom’s recent diagnosis with Alzheimer’s Disease, leaving my 82-year-old dad to manage her care with me “assisting” from three hours drive away.

It’s hard to see the lucky in our household budget with many times more outgo than income, in my ongoing effort to find a balance for my own health, and events like a recent night when the deer nudged open our garden gate and ate their way through the tomatoes, chard, strawberries, and the fall lettuce planting.

If this is “lucky,” give me less of it, please.

After getting over my crankiness, I think I understand the thrust of the comment: I’m fortunate to have potentially rich opportunities, to be able to make the kinds of choices I make, and to be living a full, present, relatively gracious life with all the above.

That’s “luck,” I suppose, the kind that takes some mighty hard work to recognize. (And it reminds me of the proverbial Chinese curse: May your life be interesting.)

We don’t get to pick what life brings us. What power we have over events and circumstance lies in how we respond.

The choices we make are what make us fortunate when they return riches of any kind, most especially those lasting ones of heart and spirit – the warmth of sunrises and sunsets, the gift of love, the sound of sandhill cranes’ haunting calls as they wing high over head, the sight of aspen leaves flaming gold on the mountainsides, the feel of frosty air at dawn. Those riches are available to us no matter what is happening.

Whether we see or feel them is our choice.

Not that the choosing is either simple or easy – it’s not. But those choices determine whether we can find beauty and happiness in even the most difficult of days, or not.

So yes, we are lucky in that we’ve been able to approach Richard’s brain cancer with relative equanimity. Back when we first had an inkling that something was wrong, when the bird hallucinations visited his brain, we determined to walk forward hand and hand and to take what came with grace.

We’ve stuck to that resolve by and large, and I’d say that our intention is part of why he continues to defy the odds, and to enjoy his life.

Luck’s hard work though, not happenstance. It’s the attitude to you bring to life, the spirit you cultivate, the way you are in even the most unassuming of moments.