Here is a disclaimer before I continue: This is not my fortune from this week’s lunch. It actually belongs to a loud, twenty-something girl sitting in the booth full of women office workers next to me. I found it so funny I had to comment on it. I will write about my actual fortune next week.

Girl: “‘Life is a daring adventure’. Seriously? I hate it when a fortune is not a fortune. This is dumb. This is a statement, not a fortune. I want something, like, ominous.”

Her exact words. I kid you not.

“I want something, like, ominous.”

I find it fascinating how often we humans are not content with the average, the day-to-day, the pleasantly understated. Instead we’re on a never-ending quest for bigger, better, faster, stronger. Something else. Something more. Always more. Something linguistic analyst Lyndon Duke referred to as the “curse of exceptionality.”

A simple fortune is not enough. Oh no, it needs to be ominous, mysterious, foreboding. The irony with this, and all, fortunes is they are as deep and “ominous” as we choose to interpret them. Personally I think “Life is a daring adventure” is laced with all different levels of meaning.

Because in the end, life really is all in the way we choose to see it.

To your good fortune!