It's a miracle!

When you think about, being alive is astonishing, astounding, even mind-boggling.

First of all, of course, is the fact that one particular sperm had to reach that particular egg that particular time for you to be you and me to be me.  That's one sperm out of an average of 250 million.  

But even more than that, I consider how many hundreds of thousands of our ancestors had to survive plagues and famines and deadly creatures and lethal infections and accidents and wars in order for you and me to be here.  We are the descendants of survivors, beings who were strong enough, and smart enough, and adaptable enough, and lucky enough to have survived this harsh, dangerous world of kill or be killed.

We're not so different from those survivors in some ways, except that for a lot of us, our survival is pretty well assured.  This allows us to be  proud, to be lazy, to be wasteful, to be depressed or ornery or mean, to take for granted this miraculous gift of being alive.  But it also allows us to be reflective, as we have the leisure and security to be able to ask what it all means.  So it's only natural that we make up gods and goddesses, as every primitive culture has done since the beginning of humanity.  We need a sense of order to it all, a sense that someone is in charge, because without that, then what the heck does it mean?

I envy cheetahs and moths and squids and lichen.  They don't have these great big brains asking these great big questions.  Life doesn't have to mean anything at all to them.  To all other beings but us, life is just what it is.

I know that it's not possible for me to live in that fully present way.  Like all humans, I'm a storyteller, a meaning maker, a question asker.  But I can see the beauty of living without meaning, or at least without meaning appointed from outside of me.  That frees me up to create my own meaning, my own purpose, my own direction.  I don't know if I have free will, but I figure I may as well live as though I do, as  though I am able to make choices that are not necessarily determined by Fate or biology or upbringing.  

That leads, of course, to the question of what have I decided my life means?  You would think I would have answered that one by now, but I'm still thinking...