You Are A Winner !

Congratulations you are the first reader of the 200th Monkeymind blog and winner of a brand new absolutely nothing! Which is a shame. Anyone who has read them all deserves something for their forbearance, tolerance , patience, and high pain threshold. Go ahead, give yourself a treat. Eat an ice cream cone or buy some snow tires. It's your choice and you have my blessing.

I've won a few things in my life. I've twice won turkeys. The first one was in a raffle and the second I won by bowling the highest score in a league during Thanksgiving week. I have won basketball tickets in a free throw shooting contest and a case of beer and a t-shirt in a closest to the pin hole in a golf tournament. I was also on a team that won a golf "Scramble" which is a type of tournament and we teammates each pocketed about fifty bucks for that achievement. The big luckies like cars and houses and Reader's Digest millions have thus far eluded me. Maybe next week.

I do believe in luck, joss, buena fortuna or whatever you choose to call unexpected happy happenings even if they are only the avoidance of downer deeds. Chance seems to play a part in our lives even if most of what occurs is a result of our own doings. The short list of my winnings noted in the previous paragraph shows all but one were actually earned awards. That one, though, the raffle turkey, was pure chance and maybe luck exists in roughly that ratio of earned to random good fortune. I also believe that some people are just, flat luckier than others. Multiple lottery winners come to mind and lone survivors of this disaster or that accident seem to bear me out on that point. Years ago I wrote a bit about a guy who had achieved everything in life, fame, wealth and happiness but as he walks up the aisle to accept his award as the Man of the Century he trips over a blind man's cane, tumbles into the orchestra pit and is impaled on a drumstick. The podium then topples onto him from the stage and the man ends his days in a rocker sucking his thumb and humming show tunes. I have no idea where that story is now, but it goes to show how lucky you are. If I could find it, you'd have to read it because I'd make it a blog.

And that, I suspect, would be pushing my luck.