Finding Your Luck (by Cheryl Renée Herbsman)

What is luck? Is it really finding that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? Gold is pretty cool. You can buy a lot of stuff with it. Maybe you can be freed up from a lot of worries if you have it. You can provide for your family. Yep, it's pretty cool.

It's funny, though, because there are tons of stories of people who won the lottery and ended up depressed, alone, miserable.... So maybe the pot of gold isn't exactly the point. Maybe the point is actually the rainbow that gets you there.

Funny thing about rainbows -- they boast every color, not just gold, and funnier still, they usually show up after rain.

So maybe luck isn't the pot of gold that's found at the end of the rainbow, but the journey it takes to get there. And maybe if someone just hands you the pot, it's not so lucky after all. And maybe part of that luck is experiencing all those different hues that come together to make a life -- the good days and the bad. And maybe the rain that's falling outside my window today is a necessary step on that path.

I looked up quotes about luck on the Internet. Some of them said that everything is luck. Others suggested that luck is only hard work in disguise. I liked this one:

"All of us have bad luck and good luck. The man who persists through the bad luck - who keeps right on going - is the man who is there when the good luck comes - and is ready to receive it." (~ Robert Collier.) This is why we should never give up.

I'd add a caveat, though -- it can be pretty hard to know which is the good luck and which is the bad. Sometimes what we believe to be good luck turns out not to be and sometimes what feels like bad luck leads us somewhere wonderful. Or as the Dalai Lama said, "Remember that sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck."

So here's my St. Patty's Day wish for you: