In the long run of life, where scarcity and need never end, we forget that life doesn’t run on the logic of economics, that every moment we get to live is anything but scarce.

Our life is simply filled with the blessing of living an ordinary life. We are wrapped in it, from the eyes we see with to the roof over our head. Everything is part of an immense luck we rarely notice. There is a proverb that says light has value because darkness exists. Our ordinary, regular life is wrapped in luck, which is exactly why we do not understand the weight of the luck we carry. From the person waiting at home to the fact of having a home at all, everything simply means being lucky.

As we are diving into this piece, it becomes clear that we are still wrapped in this exact miracle, the luck of existing in an ordinary life. Things are just ordinary enough to let us do regular things. That is a luck we rarely name.

The constant questions of our parents often feel suffocating, until we live alone in a foreign city where no one waits for us at home. Where there is no mother’s hand to feed us and no father’s missed calls to scare us to death. That is when the luck of having family beside us finally hits.

There are moments an eyelash gets into our eye, or our nose suddenly blocks up from a cold, or a sore throat swallows our voice. These are the moments we understand the weight of a healthy life.

As a kid, the proverb “health is wealth” used to sound funny, because wealth was supposed to mean luxury and money. Try asking the definition of wealth from someone who just lost their loved one to a road accident, where all their money and all their expensive watches could not do a single thing.

Graveyards are a place people go to mourn, often carrying the heaviness of feelings left unsaid. And in that very moment, it becomes clear that most of us are still lucky enough to run to the people we love and tell them exactly what they mean to us, while they can still hear it.

The best place to understand the weight of the good luck we carry is a hospital, particularly a government hospital. There, people lie on the sidewalk outside, on the stairs, in every possible and impossible corner, just to save a loved one, just to live an ordinary life with functioning body parts.

We are often so caught up chasing what we don’t have that we stop seeing what we already do, and quietly, we get tangled in the web of our own ungratefulness.

We have good health. We have people who love us. We have a roof over our heads. These are things a large part of this world does not have.

We often complain that we can’t sleep because of noise or sunlight, while people are sleeping on the sidewalk of a busy road at burning noon.

Meanwhile, we call ourselves unlucky because the dinner table did not have what we wanted to eat, or because we do not have AC in our room.

At the end of the day, luck is subjective. Almost no one believes they are lucky for most of their life. People only realise it once the basic things start disappearing, and only then do they think: oh, I was actually lucky.

One day, my family was rushing between hospitals for a loved one, and there was no seat available in any of them. Since then, I carry that fact with me. While I am living a very ordinary, possibly a boring life, there are hundreds of hospitals, filled with people who are not as lucky. And on those ordinary days, a calm realisation hits that I am just lucky enough to simply exist in the ordinary.

Through these small realisations, I try to break free from “if”, and hold on instead to the luck that simply exists in ordinary life.