Life can take you by surprise.
Sometimes, it’s nothing but a soft-packed powdery snowball that hits you in the face. It breaks apart on your nose and showers your head and shoulders with frozen particles that slip down your collar and make you scream, laugh and shiver.
Sometimes, a stone inside the snowball turns the snow into ice. When this hits you in the face, it smashes your nose flat; it splits your upper lip; breaks your front teeth. You feel numb, and your lower lip and chin feel wetter and warmer than they should. The pain starts. Your tongue finds sharp edges where your front teeth used to be. You find chunks of tooth enamel in your mouth. Your upper lip no longer puckers like it used to. The bridge of your nose swells up and the pain is a constant and hateful agony.
That’s life. That’s what it does.
Then you scab over and heal. Bones knit. Stitches dissolve. Your scars remind you of what life can do. Your body becomes a monument to your accidents and injuries. Your mind remembers it all. Its fundamental structure changed with each trauma. As you age, you manage these hurts and aches as best you can. Old age does not, indeed, come alone.
Life is change. It doesn’t matter how well or how hard you plan: life will always throw snowballs at you. Some people are lucky to get hit with the soft-packed powdery stuff. Others are not so fortunate and get hit by the hard motherfuckers. It doesn’t matter how much you jink and weave because you can’t dodge them all. We all get hit by an extinction level event snowball at some point. Our lives are finite, and as the saying goes, nobody gets out of it alive.
But life is also unbelievably and impossibly precious.
We estimate the age of the Universe to be around fourteen billion years. When we peer out with our space telescopes, we see only a miniscule portion of what is out there. Astronomers talk of the visible universe and what lies beyond. It could go on forever. Nobody knows. When we look deep into the Cosmos, we see billions of galaxies. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is an average galaxy within those billions. Our star, the Sun, is an average star among the billions of stars within the Milky Way. The Earth is one tiny planet, one of eight, that orbits that average star, and it might be impossible to say just how average the Earth is, or how special.
The chemical elements that comprise Earth, the Sun, and all the planets in our Solar System were forged in stars over ten billion years of nuclear fusion. The Earth orbits in the Goldilocks Zone around our star, not too close and not too far, but just right, so that water is liquid on the planet’s surface. Water, as a liquid, is a universal solvent and is the perfect substance within which molecules can dissolve and combine with others to build bigger molecules. About three point seven billion years ago, those molecules became complicated enough to self-replicate by natural chemical processes, and soon they combined by reproduction and evolution into what we call life.
Over the following three point three billion years, a mammal evolved that is classified as Homo sapiens sapiens. That mammal would become the dominant primate species on the planet. It’s only been a species for about three hundred thousand years. That’s a mere 0.00002% of the age of the universe. Really, no time at all in the greater scheme of things.
Given the staggering amount of galaxies and stars and planets, the existence of liquid water (or equivalent) on some of those planets and the natural chemical processes that combine these elements, it is inevitable that life should occur. Earth is proof of that. If Earth is one such planet, does it not follow that there might be many more? Likely, we are not alone. Life could appear elsewhere, given the right combination of conditions and a smidgeon of time. Relatively speaking, its probabilities all the way down.
Within all of that universal immensity and practical infinity, we find ourselves on Earth: we circle a star that is hot enough and stable enough, just far enough away to allow water to remain liquid. The failed suns we call gas giants orbit farther from the Sun and their mass and gravity help deflect or consume most space rocks and comets. We have a moon with a stable orbit that creates tides and predictable dynamism on the surface.
And that’s it: a tiny place in the void, the blue marble, a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
It’s a place that has remained stable over billions of years. Stable enough to allow life to evolve into ever more complex expressions. It’s come close to losing all that life several times. Ask the dinosaurs, the most well-known of mass extinctions. All life left on Earth is but a tiny fraction of all the species that have ever lived here. It’s only because of a very remote probability, a freak statistic and a shit-load of luck that we find ourselves here with a brain that can observe and think and reason. It’s a practical wonder that we even exist.
So. Life’s a bitch and a bit of a marvel. So what?
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I’ve spent long periods of my life worrying about what people will think if I let them in. I have solid reasons for feeling that way. For a long time, I didn’t have the self-knowledge or wisdom to understand what I was doing. I knew I wanted to write, and I continued to write, but I found it hard to share it. I felt scared. It took me a lot of reading, writing and thinking to understand that I’m less than nothing. We stand fascinated at the mayfly living its life in a day, but in the deep time of the age of the universe, our lives flicker. It’s as if we are almost not here at all.
What use are ego and fear when we are such insignificant beings who live for such a fleeting moment?
In our own ways, in our primate brains, we are all scared. Our primitive animal brain is still there. It’s still doing what it’s done for millions of years: to keep us safe and alive and able to reproduce. If our brains were all neo-cortex, we wouldn’t be any better than machines. It’s in our older animal brains where our deeper emotions emerge. Those emotions define what it means to be human. Those emotions are the human condition. It is natural for us to fear the unknown and strive to ensure our emotional and physical safety. But these feelings can go too far and can inhibit us from being what we can be.
So, at the universal scale of time and space, does any of it matter? No. Not one bit.
It doesn’t matter what I do or what people say or how scared I become because… none of it matters. I don’t consider that a nihilistic thought and it doesn’t frighten or sadden me. It’s liberating. I’m freed, not from any responsibility or blame, but from my fear. How can I be afraid if everything is up for interpretation? When the universe is so big and so young?
I find meaning and value in my life in those I love and care about, and if I’m lucky, who care about and love me in return. The meaning is in how I treat them, look after them, and treasure them. I want this network of people that are close to me to have everything they need.
I find meaning and value in what I help to create. I want these creations to be and make a positive influence on those lives that engage with them.
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Considering how we got here, through all that time and space, beating the odds and with the potential for life to beat the shit out of us, I’d still rather be here and thinking than not. Wouldn’t you?
It’s great to be alive. Every single one of us billions is unique. Every one is an improbable statistic. Each observes the world from their own point of view so that everything is inherently relative. How can we make any sense of it? I do it by writing, by trying to corral the ideas flying around in my head, trying to be aware of whose point of view I’m telling the story from, and to come to some kind of understanding. Some kind of truth.
I’m focused and working hard on the things that mean the most to me. It’s the only thing that makes sense to my life. I’ve said goodbye to my ego since it doesn’t mean shit. I will create and care and hope that my efforts reach the people that need it the most. I’ll succeed or I won’t. That’s fine. I’ll keep going. What else am I going to do?
I’m the best me when I choose to write. I’m lucky to have that choice. That is reason enough to attempt it.
Being alive and ourselves are the best and most precious things that each of us has. But we are here, we are alive, and we can choose for ourselves.
What have we got to lose?