There are billions of people alive today (and many others who have been alive before) but you are still one of them. One of a finite set of personalities, features, and traits to parade this world stage. One of a limited number of beings to walk around this rock - filling your lungs with its air and your ears with its sounds and your mind with its verity.
You are alive.
Up against a trillion-billion theoretical people who don't exist, you are one of the ones who does. You are experiencing this life, this consciousness, this one intricate and cosmic existence of which we are all a part.
For all we know both forwards and backwards in time, and millions of light-years around us, there is only one reality - and you're in it. For all the theories of how big or long or old or fast the universe is, it all still exists within this one existence and you're in it. For all the great accomplishments and philosophies, tragedies and theories, they all still took place in this one actuality, and you're in it.
In the cast for the beings who would enact the drama of life, you made the cut.
You're here; reading, breathing, thinking, feeling, recalling, planning, wanting, knowing. I'm talking to you. I know you've had a certain kind of day and you're in a certain mood and reading this wasn't supposed to take more than a minute, but I'm speaking to you. I'm a being, conveying ideas to you through words that our brains understand, and we've both been living our whole lives in this miraculous reality. Are you getting a sense of that?
Not necessarily that we all have a great part to play in the drama of life or that we experience it in the same way, but beyond our jobs and plans and pasts we are here. We are alive. You and I didn't have to be two of the people in this reality, but we are. We might never have existed, and the whole cacophony of being would have played out bereft of us, but it didn't, we're here.
When I get thinking like this it reminds of the start of Jostein Gaarde's book Sophie's World.
"as she stood outside on the gravel path with the mysterious letter in her hand, the strangest feeling came over her. She felt like a doll that had suddenly been brought to life by the wave of a magic wand. Wasn't it extraordinary to be in the world right now, wandering around in a wonderful adventure!"
If we were dolls brought to life perhaps we'd have an easier time wondering at our sheer existence. I think it's the laborious process of growing and growing-up that takes it from us. By the time we are rational/cognitive/conscious enough to behold our own reality we are assuming our place within a culture. The people we look to around us have a surprising disinterest in their coming to life and little to no plan for their eventual end. We busy ourselves with the tasks and trinkets at hand. School, university, car, career, marriage, house, kids and the bank keeps your score.
But it's not a game. It's not a movie, it's not a sport, it's not a test, it's life: real, whole, bold and weighty, drenched in significance. Perhaps we need to defer our philosophizing to get on and do it, but surely we need to first be arrested by the eminence to make sure we're doing it properly. And at the very least you need a worldview that can bear the immensity of the brief but terrifying axiom that you are alive.
Sam Manchester is currently a theology student with an inescapable sociology degree behind him. In an attempt to reconcile the two, he reflects and writes about their coalescence in everyday life.
Sam's archive of articles may be viewed at www.pressserviceinternational.org/sam-manchester.html