I do believe I'll win, I do believe I'll win, I do I do I do believe I'll win

When I was at the convenience store earlier I impulsively bought two lottery tickets, one for the Powerball game, and the other a Megabucks ticket. This is something I do very, very rarely, mainly because I know it to be a waste of my money, but also because I feel awkward doing it, as a result of almost never doing it! I don't know the proper terminology, or even (until recently) the proper procedure. And you know me and hating to appear foolish.

But there was no one else in the store at the moment but me and "Rusty," the (female) cashier, and I wasn't worried about appearing foolish to her. I was just going to buy one ticket, but when she asked "Do you want the Powerball or Megabucks (which is the first time I knew the two were not the same), I thought, what the heck, in for a penny, in for a pound.

So do I really expect to win? Well, no. I do know that the odds of my winning are absurdly small (more likely to get struck by lightning, isn't that how it goes?); besides which I am too much the eternal pessimist. But I'd like to be some-one who expected to win. Isn't that what all those self-help gurus say, "You've got to envision what you want to happen, and it will," and “If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change,” (that one is a direct quote from PBS's irritating Dr Wayne Dyer). Well, I have lots of times envisioned myself winning the lottery -- know exactly what I'd do with all that money, in what order -- but obviously I must take the additional step and occasionally play, in order to win.

What it all comes down to, I think, is faith. I simply am not a person of faith. And to get through this life with anything approaching equanimity, it seems to me that one really does need to have faith in something. If not in a loving, merciful god who will take care of you, than in yourself, or in the various forces at work in the universe ("It'll all work out in the end," "Things have a way of working out," etc.) That's what those people who play the lottery for literally years, and finally win, have. Faith that eventually God will answer their prayers, or that that mysterious thing called Luck will finally look their way.

It's the same kind of faith that people have who keep sending out manuscripts they've written, even though they get rejected time after time. They believe that eventually someone will like what they've written, and help them to publish it. I have never had that faith, and so have tended to give up after a few tries -- then maybe I'll try again a few times, after a few years have passed -- then give up again in discouragement. Never get published that way, never win the lottery.

I'm inclined to think that the ability to have faith -- which produces hope -- is the most important characteristic one can have in life. Even more than compassion, which I think is extremely important, even more than energy, which is necessary to get anything accomplished, one must have faith, or one is likely to be saddled with a negative outlook on life.

But it has to be real; you can't fake faith. Aye, there's the rub.