This morning, all of a sudden, I felt filthy rich.
I was on my morning walk. My partner beside me, my youngest son doing laps around us on his little bike. Warm spring sunshine on our faces, nature all around. At one point the path runs alongside a road, and this morning it was packed with people commuting. All in a rush, all looking pretty miserable.
That was the moment it hit me. The peace, the luck, the richness of it. I felt genuinely privileged. Privileged to work from home and have space for a family moment before the day starts, instead of sitting in traffic. Privileged to work remotely from the town where I grew up, close to the people I love. Privileged to be able to take care of myself in the morning sun without a notification pulling me away.
Is that not something to feel proud of?
I've been on the other side. Long commutes, workplaces I didn't want to be in, colleagues who added noise rather than anything else, always running late to something. I lived that for long enough to know I wanted something different, something closer to what living actually means in its simplest sense.
This morning I felt rich, not because of my paycheck, but because I am happy. Content with what I have, and at the same time genuinely energised about what's still ahead. Rich because I could do something simple, with no stress, no cortisol spike, no interruptions.
And then I thought about how lucky I am. Not lucky in the sense that I stumbled into this by chance. I don't believe that. I got here because I had a vision and I kept moving toward it. What I mean by lucky is something different: I managed to notice the moment I was in and actually feel it. That's rarer than it sounds.
Too often we skip past the good parts because we're already somewhere else in our heads. The next deadline, the next project, the mortgage, the plan. So projected toward the next achievement that we walk straight through the best moments of the journey, dismiss them as ordinary, and then look back at them with nostalgia a few years later, wishing we'd paid attention.
My kids are small but growing fast, right in front of me. Work is good, but it's a volatile sector and the future is uncertain. I'm renovating a house with my dad, building something and making memories at the same time. This is just a moment in time, but it's a really good one. The worries and the bills and the toddler meltdowns are all there too. None of that changes what this period of my life is.
I want to take it in as much as I can.
Will it last forever? I can't know. But what I can do is work to make these moments more common, keep building the conditions that make them possible, and not wait passively for them to happen again. It would be a shame to notice the beauty of something and then immediately take it for granted.
I'm proud of what I've built and the journey I'm on. The people around me. The opportunities I've had. And I'm glad I'm noticing it now, before it's too late to appreciate it properly.
What a moment to be alive.