Do you consider yourself fortunate?

Are you kidding me? I don't have to walk miles every day with a bucket to haul unclean water back to my family. I don't have malaria. I have more than enough food - I have to be conscious of not eating too much! I have a washer and dryer and changes of clothes and electricity and a computer and high speed internet and a car and a bicycle. I have a great relationship with a wonderful partner. I have lovely (sometimes ornery) animals who live with us. I have a home. I have space for a garden. I have a dogwood tree in my backyard and daffodils that come out in the spring and moss grows on the ground all by itself and other than the poison ivy hedge growing along one of the fences, a great living space.
Fortunate implies some other option - for someone to be fortunate, there has to be a concept of unfortunate. Some people are truly unfortunate in their circumstances, others in their choices, and lots of people a combination of both. Some of the people who are walking miles for dirty water may be happier day to day than someone else living in the suburbs and shopping at Ikea. Not that the unhappy Ikea shoppers would cheer up if they switched places, but there is something a little subversive about having enough to want too much.
Some people just default to unhappy - like the grinch, their hearts are just a few sizes too small. That's an unfortunate circumstance, but also maybe a choice. Well, I hope it's a choice, because then they have options, right? I don't want to think that the unhappy people are stuck that way, like the way my mom said if I made a face it would stick. Except she was sort of right I think - if you hold your face the same way all the time, eventually it does stick. I think unhappiness is like that too: if you look at the faces of old people you can see who got stuck in unhappiness, in the idea that they are just unfortunate, who held their face that way for too long and it stuck, who hung on to their miseries.
I am fortunate that I kind of default to happy even in the worst times, and that I have this wonderful life, and that I refuse to take that for granted or cling to miseries. A good combination of choice and circumstance.