That Son of a Gun Lucky Bastard

I’ve started to realize that my life has this uncanny rhythm to it: things wobble, the ground shakes, the ladder leans in all the wrong ways, and somehow I still end up standing there like nothing happened, brushing the dust off my pants and grinning like a son of a gun lucky bastard. It looks like magic from the outside, but it’s not really magic.

It’s just the strange, beautiful alchemy of people and timing and the willingness to leap without rehearsing every move. Some folks would call it reckless. I prefer to think of it as trust. Not trust in the universe, though maybe that too, but mostly in the messy, extraordinary, entirely human people I let orbit my life. They’re the ones who shove me back into the light when I drift into the dark, the ones who point out the shortcuts I’d have missed, the ones who throw me the rope when I’ve already jumped without looking. They’re the reason my falls never really hurt, and the reason everything that looks impossible at first ends up just happening, clean and quick and strangely easy.

And I think maybe that’s the secret: it only works because I wake up every morning and decide to be that lucky bastard. I decide to believe the fall will end with a bounce instead of a bruise, that the coffee will taste better after the chaos, that the cracks in the plan are just extra windows for the light to get in. If I didn’t choose it, the wobble would stay a wobble and the ladder would crash. But I choose it. And choosing it means there’s always a little space for joy to slip in, for speed to feel like grace, for difficulty to turn into the story I laugh about later.

Maybe it won’t always be this way. Maybe one day the net won’t be there, or the crowd of imperfect saints who keep pulling me through will be scattered across other stages. Maybe luck will change its name. But for now, I get to keep practicing this small miracle of stumbling forward into exactly the right place, again and again, pretending it’s all part of the plan.

And maybe, just maybe, you’re that lucky bastard too.
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