Tag: Human

Miracle. All of it.

Live & Learn19 Comments

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.

‘he wasn’t all there…’

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Uncle Arch…We drove past the front door pretty much every time we visited Dad’s parents but we only went inside on one occasion. My sole memory is that one wall of the living room was unrendered and that the place had an air of profound sadness, though the latter may have been my own projection. He never came to Christmas lunch at our house with his brother and sister-in-law. I can only assume he wasn’t invited. In our entire lives Fiona and I saw him a handful of times at most, during that single visit and at a couple of family funerals and weddings. He seemed placid and slow and a little scruffy, but otherwise not greatly different from many other guests. He never married, never had children. I don’t think he worked. Later when I asked Mum about him she said, ‘He wasn’t all there,’ and refused to elaborate so that I have no idea whether he had some kind of learning difficulty or whether he was heavily medicated for a psychiatric illness, but he lived independently into his sixties so whatever difficulties he faced were not insuperable ones. I’ve since worked with many people like Uncle Arch, the kind of people we pass all too easily in the street, forgetting that they have stories and experiences and interior lives of as much value as our own but who get pushed to the edge of society, who are excluded from family events because they’re seen as shameful, because their personal hygiene isn’t perfect, because they might behave inappropriately, because we don’t know how to behave in their presence. I can’t think about Uncle Arch without thinking of how completely and how effectively he was written out of our lives, and I’m embarrassed to admit that I never once looked around the table at Christmas lunch and thought about him sitting eating his Christmas lunch alone four miles away.

— Mark Haddon, Leaving Home: A Memoir in Full Colour (Doubleday, February 17, 2026)

Notes:

Lightly Child, Lightly.

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Gently he grasped the copper handle of the door – the warmth of the mountains, woods, rivers and valleys, would discover the hidden depths of human existence, would finally understand that the unbreakable ties that bound him to the world were not imprisoning chains and condemnation but a kind of clinging to an indestructible sense that he had a home; and he would discover the enormous joys of mutuality which embraced and animated everything: rain, wind, sun and snow, the flight of a bird, the taste of fruit, the scent of grass; and he would suspect that his anxieties and bitterness were merely cumbersome ballast required by the live roots of his past and the rising airship of his certain future, and, then – he started opening the door – he would finally know that our every moment is passed in a procession across dawns and day’s-ends of the orbiting earth, across successive waves of winter and summer, threading the planets and the stars. Suitcase in hand, he stepped into the room and stood there blinking in the half-light.

― László Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance. Translated by George Szirtes. (New Directions Publishing, June 2002) (via Alive on All Channels)

Notes:

  • DK Photo @ 6:20 am yesterday morning @ Cove Island Park. More photos from yesterday’s walk here.
  • Quote: Thank you Beth via Alive on All Channels
  • 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.

Miracle, all of it.

Live & Learn28 Comments

Next morning, as the fog lifts, I have the sense I often have here, of seeing the world at the moment it comes to life. I recall looking down at the twenty-five pods gathered around the bell tower and the refectory, tiny against the hillside and the huge expanse of sea beyond; they looked so frail I wished to say a prayer for them, as for a newborn in the not always easy world. So orderly, too, in their hopeful human arrangement. Like the redwoods in the valley beside them: each with roots five feet deep, but intertwined, so the health of one depends on the health of every other.

— Pico Iyer, Aflame: Learning from Silence (Riverhead Books, January 14, 2025). Written from his cell at New Camaldoli Hermitage in the Santa Lucia Mountains of Big Sur, California.

Notes:

  • Other highlights from early in the book:
    • ““When I go out into the world,” volunteers one of the brothers, “I feel like a sea anemone…A little creature of the sea. You know how sensitive and tender they are. If they trust where they’ve been placed, they open up. Put them in a harsh environment and they close very quickly.”
    • Where are such people in my daily life? I wonder, back in my trailer. Everywhere, comes the answer, but I can’t see or stop to hear them. I’m too caught up in my own schedule, my seeming busyness. Like someone who plays the radio all the time and claims never to hear the sea.
    • Luxury indeed to follow whim; my conscious mind can argue me out of any belief and into it again. Pure joy to inhabit a world whose dictionary has no place for “worry” or for “strife.” I recall the day I flew across the ocean after hearing that my father was in the ICU; as I stepped into the small hospital room, I realized that my bank account, my resume, my business card would none of them be of very much help at all. The only thing that could sustain him—or me—would be whatever I’d gathered in stillness.
  • Review of Pico Iyer’s new book here: Pico Iyer Made His Name Traveling. Now He Explores Inner Landscapes. (NY Times, Jan 3 2025)
  • Photo: Vladimir Miranda, Cabo Mexico.
  • Post Title Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle.”

Look for the human…

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Her gesture then was as gracious as everything about her. Choose her well, she’d said. What words. I wanted someone exactly like her, just twenty years younger, which was how old she was when she stayed at my great-grandmother’s in Egypt after escaping Germany, when all the men in the house, having watched her play the piano in the living room, swore they’d lost their minds over her…She loved me and I loved her. Choose her well. No one would have said it in just that way, or found words so spare and quick to help dodge the heartrending elegy in her voice. She was the only person with whom I could discuss ideas—not academically, which is how so many professors pour notions into our heads, but ideas with a completely human dimension, which is what ideas are in the end, not lifeless slugs devoid of human features, but sentient figures of what we live with when we can’t even tell a feeling from a thought and can only sketch what is bound to miss the mark. Look for the human, she would say when she wasn’t asking me to think American—even if there’s no proof you’re right, look for the human. What a pleasure to spell out my thoughts with her, when she’d ask what did I think such-and-such an author was really, really thinking when he wrote that piece? Then, turning to music, she’d say, This was what Beethoven struggled with when composing this sonata. “Do I know this for sure?” she’d ask. “No. Do I have any proof? No. But am I right? Absolutely.” […]

As it turned out, Look for the human was what I never forgot. I passed it on to those who listened. It was, however, almost impossible for others to practice, having never met Flora.

— André Aciman, Roman Year: A Memoir (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, October 22, 2024)

Notes:

  • DK Recommendation? Loved it!
  • Book Reviews
    • NY Times: “Roman Year“: An Exile Revisits the Squalor and Grandeur of 1960s Italy
      • “Aciman evokes the passing of time in rich, meandering prose, rebuilding 1960s Rome in sentences suffused with light and sound and memories — the taste of an artichoke, the smell of bergamot and of Crêpe de Chine perfume. From the bewilderment of arrival, the young Aciman moves through denial toward a gradual acceptance of his new life. “Roman Year” is both an affecting coming-of-age story and a timely, distinctive description of the haunted lives of refugees.”
    • Guardian: Memento Amore