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      You could say that I worked every minute of my life, or you could say with equal precision that I never worked a day. I have always subscribed to the expression, "Thank God it's Friday," because to me Friday means I can work the next two days without interruption. John Hope Franklin, historian    | |   Count Your BlessingsJuly 13, 2005
"I've always been unlucky," moaned an Aussie rugby player. "If Brigitte Bardot had had triplets, I would have been the one on the bottle."
I, on the other hand, feel blessed. I need only read the daily newspaper, with its accounts of bombings and crashes, starvation and disease, to be reminded how lucky I am.
Many years ago, I read an article, "Reflections on Happiness," in which Nathaniel Branden wrote about his wife Devers. Even though she hadn't had an easy life, she was an uncommonly happy person. One of the keys to her happiness was that she "almost never went to sleep at night without taking time to review everything good in her life; those were typically her last thoughts of the day."
For a long time, I followed Devers's ritual. But it became too mechanistic for me, so I changed it. What I do now before falling asleep is look back on the day and identify five moments to be especially grateful for.
It should be easy. But - I'm ashamed to admit this - on some nights it isn't. Not because there weren't any good moments. There were hundreds. But I missed them. I sleep-walked through an activity-filled day and missed out on the moments that were there to savor. The smile. The touch. The aroma. The birdsong. I missed them all. On such nights, I realize with chagrin that, yet again, I was so intent on performing the functions of living that I missed out on the experience of being alive - what Joseph Campbell called "the rapture of being alive":
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