Dear Cali Chica:

We are emotional beings, motivated by emotions, not by logic. It is that energy-in motion (e-emotion) that drives us. It drives not only our behavior, that is, the things we do and say, but what we think: “everywhere I go, and everything I do.. I am occupied by negative thoughts about other people”.

Your negative thoughts (those that you don’t end up expressing via the act of talking-to-your-husband or typing-here and those that lead to acts) are motivated by emotion.

“I am occupied by negative thoughts about other people. People who act with injustice... unaware.. irritating.. arrogant.. Endless commentary”- the emotion that motivates these thoughts, this endless inner commentary, is anger. It is anger about the injustice of life that your mother presented to you in your formative years, and that anger has been formed in your many neuropathways.

As you observe life in the subway, at work, in the grocery store, wherever you go, images of people enter your brain and the anger gets activated. It is the same anger she introduced to you early on, repeatedly: anger at the injustice of being unlucky while other people are lucky.

Clearly, the fact that your mother was able to live the five star lifestyle she showed off to others, having a beautiful (I imagine) house, clothes, jewelry, traveling the world, being physically healthy and not burdened with the stress of an undesirable job (she has never worked for a living, not as a married woman anyway)- these things were not enough to make her lucky in her own mind.

And in your mind, living where many people consider the best place in the world, traveling the world (London, Paris, South Africa, and within the U.S., a skiing resort somewhere- these are the places you visited while communicating with me)- these are not enough to make you lucky in your own mind.

The reason these are not enough is because there is a yet to be resolved issue- injustice. And anger fuels the search for justice.

Can you define luck as you understood it from early on, in a stream of consciousness way, maybe?

anita