When the first of us arrived, there were no predators, no competition. We were alone on an abundant land with abundant seas and benign weather.
When more of us arrived, we were lucky to find an indigenous people offering support and kindness. We found a sparsely populated land bursting with potential. When wealth was needed for infrastructure, we found gold. When horror came to the northern hemisphere in 1914, it stayed far from our shores.
While the Depression hit hard, we survived, lucky to be in a land so abundant, surrounded by folk of hard toil. When war came again, again it stayed far from our shores. We were not bombed, not invaded. We were lucky. With war's end, our food-bowl economy soared. We learned how to better see each other as fellow Kiwis, not as different races.
Then the internet found us, here, at the bottom of the world. With the push of a button, the tyranny of distance was replaced with connectivity. We felt especially lucky, tucked away as we were, so far from our friends and markets.
We have had left and right-leaning prime ministers. When we step back a pace, we see how lucky we are that they have all served our country first, rather than their ideology. We have been lucky.
We saw the manifestation of that luck yesterday, as thousands of people filled Hagley Park, Christchurch, honouring those affected by the March 15 terror attacks. Lucky that we live in a nation where the response to horror is to spread love, to openly express the togetherness we feel for each other, for our fellow Kiwis.
It wasn't a display of tribalism, of brief respite amidst simmering resentment. It was a display of New Zealand.
But among the good luck we have experienced as a nation has been bad luck. Our first settlers, horticulturalists the equal of any the world had seen, arrived in a land virtually devoid of edible plants and unsuited to the crops they were familiar with.
The bad luck that, somehow, we managed to turn a peaceful settlement into a war zone in the second half of the 19th century, fighting among what has now so clearly become "ourselves".
The bad luck that, while the gold provided wealth, we had a massive country to lay infrastructure over and nowhere near the means to do that properly.
The bad luck that when wars and the economic depression came, our people suffered horribly, both here and abroad, many paying the ultimate price while families and friends were left with voids they would never fill.
Unlucky that, despite the peace and prosperity we find ourselves living among, we are still a home to people who would willingly bring horror, heartbreak, hatred and death to those of us who are peacefully worshipping.
Of course, we can choose to see the world, to see our country, this way - as lucky or not. But by and large, it is nonsense. We are the product of our decisions, far more than we are the product of luck.
As a nation, we make decisions which lead to who and what we are. Yesterday, in the Christchurch sun, we were able to see a country grieving as one in the aftermath of horror.
But it was more than that. It was the image of a country choosing good over bad, no matter what luck may bring. It was a country choosing peace and acceptance over insecurity and fear.
We are a lucky country, of course. But more than that, we are a country which chooses Friday, March 29, 2019, rather than the Friday two weeks earlier.
That is not luck. That is us. This is who we are.
