Life is good

I'm on a long flight from Moscow to New York, feeling extraordinarily lucky to live in a time when I can shuffle my iPod to play Flaming Lips' "Do You Realize?", Led Zeppelin's "Going to California" (Live version from the BBC Sessions), Talking Heads' "Road to Nowhere," and more. When I'm done I'll get to read Charles Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewitt.

What a lucky person I am! What a fortunate, rich people we are. I spend so much time fretting about business that it's far too easy to forget how wonderful this world is. (Not the least reason being that I will get to ski this week at Snowbird and mountain bike The Bobsled.)

Standing in the aisle in front of me is a beautiful Russian woman. Not "beautiful" in the Cosmopolitan or Hollywood sense of the word, but beautiful in that her eyes reflect the travails and successes of a proud nation. Beautiful because she's smiling.

Now Karl Richter is playing a wonderful Bach organ solo in my ears....

Life is good.