*To Be Thankful is To Be Lucky

[Jiggly_333]

I don’t know how to properly introduce this in-character or even in-universe. I felt that since I had a lot of money that I needed to grab for my equipment and that there was double media for “Being Thankful”, I’d write an article. And that idea for an article became an idea to just attempt to write a poem. Unfortunately, I need as many words as possible to get through this, meaning that I was just about to plan a 2500+ word poem. And you know what, I feel like challenging myself in that way. I’m giving myself some wiggle room here with my introduction paragraph, but whatever. When Rose Jenkins retired, I wrote a modified version of Carl Sandburg’s poem for Chicago, so I think that in-universe she’s the one who’s writing this poem for Player’s Tribune or her Instagram or whatever. It should be spoken word prose, but I don’t get as much money if I do it that way. So here it is written out:

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To be thankful is to be lucky
Years ago you were one sperm cell out of tens of billions
And you became one child out of only 8 billion people
The odds of you making it out of childhood were dependant on your birth
When you were born
Where you were born
How you were born
Were you vaccinated?
Were you in a loving home?
Were you in a community that kept you safe?
And you’ve made it to whatever point you are
Actuarial tables count the deaths along the way of those who weren’t able to make it where you are today.
So whatever your situation
Wherever you now live
However you now live
It’s still a miracle that you’re alive
You are lucky
No matter how unfortunate you may feel.
But that amount of luck is just so unfathomable.
When faced with numbers that big, we as humans aren’t equipped to understand what any of it means
The shape of the earth isn’t visible to the human eye
So how could one person out of 8 billion feel lucky?
How can you say that you’re thankful when all you have felt is shit?
The human experience is pain
Humans encounter trauma and hold onto it their entire lives, like a parasite that lives off of that pain
Humans encounter happiness and have to struggle to remember what those feelings were like later on
And when people are told that their life isn’t the worst
When you expect feelings of relief with the knowledge that you are not alone
That you are so blessed
That you should be thankful
The only thing that appears
Sinking down and adding onto any of the weight you were already carrying
Is guilt
And anxiety
With the new knowledge that you shouldn’t feel sorry for yourself.
That you should feel bad for not being thankful.
That things aren’t as bad as they could get and you might have it even worse.

To be thankful is to be lucky
There are 8 billion people on the planet
There are 14 teams in the ISFL
With 11 starters on offense
11 starters on defense
A punter, and a kicker.
336 starters in the ISFL is a lot of people.
The odds of being an ISFL starter is
Zero
Point
Zero
Zero
Zero
Zero
Zero
Four
Percent.
To be a starting QB, you go down to just 14.
Out of 8 billion people in the world
I don’t even want to calculate that
And to be the starting QB for your hometown team.
There are statisticians in the world who spend their lives calculating these numbers.
Maybe they are the lucky ones.
Because they spend their time with these numbers for so long and they see how big and small they get
Maybe they get what these numbers mean
I heard a story about one of these statisticians who took the formula for finding intelligent life in the universe
The Drake Equation
And restructured it to try to find how likely it is that he’d meet his soulmate.
He reckoned it at 0.0000034%
So maybe these guys aren’t that lucky.
To be able to read the language of the universe, but still never even find a date
And that’s what luck is
To find success in one place and failure in another
To have personal losses and earning a win for the team
To lose while breaking personal records.

To be thankful is to be lucky
We all have things we can be thankful for
We all have people we can be thankful to
And maybe someone out there might be thankful to us
And to consider how lucky you might be to have multiple people be thankful for you
To be thankful to you
That is lucky
To have the ability to articulate yourself and be thankful to someone
You are lucky to have that ability

To be thankful is to be lucky
Being thankful is hard
Being thankful comes so naturally to us that we don’t often have the ability to say it out loud.
It comes so naturally that we just don’t think about it.

To be thankful is to be lucky.
Be thankful.
And stay lucky.
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(Shit, this wasn’t 2500 words. Oh well, I got very distracted while writing it.)