text: Wouldnt it be amazing to win the Lottery. I may not have won any significant money in any Lottery, but each and every one of us has won an amazing long shot lottery when we were born and we continue to win lotteries all through our lives. Not only did our sperm (One of millions produced by our fathers in their lifetime) make it to our particular egg which happened to be fertile and available at the time, but so did each and every one of our ancestors sperms and eggs in the same way down through our ancestral tree. When we say ancestral tree we are, each and every one of us on this earth, directly linked all the way back to some slimey primordal bunch of amino acids that first replicated in the warm clay sludge. That being the first pre-organism to survive and begat another just like itself. From these first twists of DNA forming and so on forward to the point where our first fish ancestor, finding that the pickings were pretty good in the very shallow shore mud, first pushed its eyes through the surface tension and looked around blurrily and went "Huh?!" Every one of those individuals in our ancestoral tree is also a total winner at life. Now that’s just the beginning of us. Add to this, the fact that before all those preceding generations had a chance to succeed, our earth had to first end up where it was at an appropriate distance from the sun with all the atoms and molecules required to seed the beinning of life. Those odds are, amazingly, even more astronomical. So that's the begat, begat, begat timeline. Along the way these same ancestors and ourselves have had to win lotteries on so many occasions just to survive. Any one single event; and ther have been thousands of them spread back along my ancestoral line, could have gone the othor way and I wouldnt be here. One single event could have wiped out my entire family tree and so so many more who share that tree. But my branch is my branch and I am here. Take, for one single example, an event in my time line around 1918, during World War I, before my grandfather had sired my father. My Grandfather was laying in a ditch on the side of the road in Lithuania. He was bleeding profusely from bullet wound in his thigh, with a shattered femur where a Russian sniper who had been positioned in the Church steeple up the road had almost succeeded in interrupting my family winning streak. His neighbour, a farmer and fellow freedom fighter, had dragged him into the ditch but now lay dead across him, with an exploded skull. That particular branch of his family tree was pruned when his head and the trajectory of another of the snipers bullets had coincided and all potential decsendants were snuffed out. Another Russian soldier walked up the road and as he passed heard my grandfathers moans. He stood in the embankment above him, laughing at his predicament and deciding to have some fun. He lifted his rifle and aimed it at my granfathers head. He fired and the bullet smashed into the dirt next to his head. The soldier cursed and reloaded but this time took his time taking aim. He fired and the bullet, and again it smashed into the dirt next to my grandfathers head. The soldier was furious now. Taking two steps forward he tried again and missed again. By now he was apopleptic with rage and stood directly over my Grandfather. He took forever to lining up the bead on his rifle (he wasnt going to miss this time) but when he fired, the gun jammed. Cursing loudly in Russian, he struggled to unjam the gun, jerking the cocking handle back and forth but with no success. So in frustration the soldier drew his dagger from its sheath and proceeded towards the very edge of the ditch to climb down. Suddenly, the sounds of approaching gunfire nearby distracted him. His head jerked up and glancing over his shoulder, he turned, ducking down and ran off up the road to seek cover. And now, here I am in my office in Australia in 2021. My daughter is working in the office next to mine and its my Sons 15 and 16th birthdays yesterday and tomorrow. Lifes a complete lottery every step of the way. And we are all the winners.