Miracle. All of it.

Posted on by Live & Learn

Or consider the process of conception, when a single egg unites with a single sperm. Each human female has about 300,000 eggs during the fertile period of her life. Each male ejaculation has about 300 million sperm. Thus each conception contains about a hundred thousand billion different possible combinations of DNA. In other words, there are a hundred thousand billion unique and different human beings that could result from each procreation event. Only one of those possible combinations led to each of you reading this article at this moment. Here’s a way to visualize that extremely tiny fraction. If you took a very long ruler that stretched from here to the planet Pluto, one inch of that distance would be you. The rest of the distance would be other possible human beings that could have been, but never were. Each of us has won a lottery with a hundred thousand billion different players.

Being alive at all is the most extraordinary stroke of good luck we will ever experience. Yet it is the easiest to overlook, to take for granted. We wake up in the morning, have our coffee, make breakfast, send the kids off to school, go to our jobs, move through our routines, worry about deadlines, check off items on our to-do list. And we forget that beneath all of it lies something profoundly rare: existence itself. The simple fact that we are here, conscious and aware, is so unlikely that it borders on the miraculous. Because we experience that miracle every day, we treat it as ordinary, even guaranteed, mostly unnoticed at all. We postpone joy, assuming there will always be more time. We don’t see the beauty in small moments.

We simply go about the business of life, without taking a second to notice life itself. In making this comment, I am aware that in the time-driven, frantic pace of our world today, many people do not have the luxury of pausing to take stock of such moments.There is a little more to the story. There will never be another you in the future of the universe. (Some apologies are due to Buddhists and Hindus, who believe in rebirth, but even the reborn individual is not the same.) From the distant past, billions of years ago, to the distant future, billions of years ahead, the universe will never see another one of you.

It is almost impossible to wrap our heads around such things. We could not have had this grand perspective as recently as a century ago. And we have found it not through Prince Henry’s ships but through our laboratories, our telescopes, and our minds. So the question is: What are we to make of the fantastically improbable fact of our existence, our moment of life? Or, as Mary Oliver asks in the last lines of her poem “The Summer Day”: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

— Alan Lightman, from “The Ordinary Miracle of Existing” (The Atlantic.com, June 2, 2026)

Notes:

  • Photo: Sunrise over Lake Superior from break wall at Presque Isle Park, Marquette, Michigan. 6:52 am. June 12, 2026. More Marquette photos here and here.
  • Post Title Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

19 thoughts on “Miracle. All of it.”

  1. ‘the universe will never see another one of you’.- hard to fathom, the odds and what won in the end – each of us

  3. “We postpone joy”… Let us try our hardest not to. Thank you for the reminder DK.

  6. Hi David. Feels so good to be here. I miss it terribly. The great thing is that what I found here for years still feeds my mind and soul. I still visit to pull an article or poem to share with a friend. Or to prepare for a meeting at work. This place is so precious, 1 in Infinity….
    And still is.

    About this post, now that I’m in my mid fifties, Mary Oliver’s words come to my mind a lot. Especially driving home northbound on lakeshore drive, with the steal blue lake Michigan on my right side, tons of steal and concrete that is beautiful downtown chicago on my left, and Swallows swooping down like whispers in this crazy world.

    Margaux Paul, a young poet, said it best:

    “I plan on washing my sheets, cooking pasta, and cleaning broken glass off the kitchen floor quickly lest it cut up any little feet. I plan on eating peaches in the summer and oysters only in months that end in -er because that’s what my mother taught me. | plan on making lovers out of poetry and poetry out of lovers. I plan to eat tomato salad with salt, oil, and hot French bread while my cousin regales me with her stories. I will swallow the bitterness of missing entire years together. I plan to say bless you when someone sneezes. Excuse me when I pass them by. I plan to forgive —even the people who don’t deserve it. I plan on giving loneliness a warm place in my bed when I need her. I plan on hosting dinner parties and listening to my friend’s laughter in the half-light of evening. I plan on sending the letter. I plan on falling in love often. Often, with the wrong people, which will make the right one’s love go down like milk and honey. I plan on making mistakes, making love, getting sunburnt, and still basking in the sunlight. What is it I plan to do with my one wild and precious life?

    Mary, I intend to live it. ”

  7. David

    If you like Alan’s book, you might also like A Beginner’s Guide to Dying by Simon Boas. I love Simon’s message about we’re the lucky ones for being born. There are billions of “us” who never came into being.

    Take care, Julian

    1. Thank you Julian. And “Billions of ‘us’ who never came into being” will stick with me. I will check out Simon Boas’ book. Appreciate it.

  8. Dear David, to be here and to hear you is so beautiful, I do agree with dear Sawsan’s expressions. Beautiful thoughts, books, you share with us as always. Thank you, Blessing you All, Love, nia

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