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Some things you work hard for and some things you're lucky to have.
I've a friend who worked very hard to educate herself, see the world, become a professor, earn a comfortable salary, build a perma-culture farm on her property, etc. But when I talk about her successes with her, she doesn't congratulate herself. She tells me she's lucky.
"What does luck have to do with it? You worked *hard* for those things?"
Her reply was basically this:
I was lucky to have parents who were financially secure and could afford to send me to good schools. I was lucky to have parents who could pay for my college education so that I never had debt. I was lucky that my grandmother left me $11,000 when she died, so that I could backpack through Europe. I was lucky to have parents who could help me put a down payment on the house, or else I wouldn't have any land to farm....
There are people in more fortunate circumstances than others. Working hard is a part of her make-up, but she counts herself lucky because she started out in life with fewer road blocks than other people have.
I like the expression, "The only man who can call himself happy is a dead one." Meaning, you can never really say, until it's over, whether you've had a happy, or even a lucky, life. You could be the happiest of men for 40 years. You can think, "I'm having a very happy life!" But then your wife and children die in an accident, and you spend the next 20 years miserable... It can all change in an instant, for better or for worse. Luck of the draw, I guess.
Oh, and the film The Cooler is a rather lovely mediation on this very topic.
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