In over fifty years of flying, I have spent countless hours looking down on the Earth from cruising altitudes as high as fifty-one thousand feet. I also observed the stars from the cockpit at very high altitudes, seeing the awesome splendor of our Milky Way galaxy, unobstructed. While cruising on autopilot, I have had thousands of hours to think about how this all came to be and how so many of us take it for granted. At high altitudes close to fifty-one thousand feet, I could make out the curvature of the Earth and think that this big ball that I am flying over at six hundred miles per hour is actually hurling around the Sun at sixty-seven thousand miles per hour. My six hundred miles per hour didn’t seem so fast, especially considering that our Sun and solar system are hurling around our galaxy at a speed close to five hundred thousand miles per hour. All of the planets, the moon, and the Sun are in a perfect relationship that allows for our existence, but very few people seem to understand and appreciate what we have. Our bodies are works of art, and it took billions of years just for the universe to create the elements we are made of.  It is my hope that How Lucky We Are will be a thought-provoking book to help children develop an appreciation for the universe and our place in it.