“Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that the mere fact of existing would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise.” _ Lewis Thomas
Sounds like a great idea, Lewis, but facing the slog of shit most of us have to deal with every day makes it easy to forget to be contentedly dazzled.
He’s right about one thing, though: the odds against any of us being here are pretty astronomical. Everything had to line up perfectly for each of us to be born. Think of how many people struggle to become parents, how many pregnancies end in miscarriage, how many babies are born ill and never make it out of infancy. Yet you are here. You are here in the weird magic tragic swirl of life on Earth.
You are not an accident of existence. You fought to get here. You’re a miraculous manifestation of consciousness, a unique configuration of genes, quirks and perks that only comes together once. No one else on the planet has what you have.
That’s why you’re amazing.
Wait, so being born is all I had to do to be amazing? And, um, I still feel like crap a lot of the time.
Well, yeah.
While we may default to shame and self-loathing in our minds, amazing is our original and constant state beneath the bullshit.
Being alive is the thing. Trees and sunsets and sex and dancing and beaches and clouds and crying and laughing. That’s the amazement of life, and we get to be part of it.
We train our minds on errands and news and work and to-dos, and the amazing gets buried and foggy and lost. We have bills and deadlines and things to do. We have to widen the picture to see the amazing.
Right now I can hear the birds squawking outside. For some reason, there are a bunch of wild parrots in our neighborhood, and they chat it up in the morning as they swoop around the towering palm trees on the block. I can see leaves fluttering in the breeze outside the window. I can see the cat curled up in a crescent shape on top of a folded fluffy blanket. I can feel one second of bliss.
Or I can stare down at my computer screen and remember that a long-ass list of duties and responsibilities and inconveniences lie ahead for me today and probably every day for the rest of my life.
Remembering amazingness feels so much better.
It may be so fleeting, such an infinitesimal fraction of a second that it’s almost imperceptible, but we can practice awareness of the amazing. Maybe if we keep on noticing and remembering to notice, we can stretch those fleeting moments into entire seconds, maybe consecutive seconds or even entire minutes of amazingness.
Of course, this hardly ever happens. But it does happen. Sometimes my eyes catch the sunlight in the clouds and the majesty of life and the universe washes over me like warm belonging, and then it vanishes.
Or I’ll read a quote like the one I started this post with and I’ll remember to notice that I’m not just a walking to-do list, but a miracle of existence on a giant marble hurtling through infinite space.