08/30/2026
Being alive at all is the most extraordinary stroke of good luck any of us will ever experience, the physicist Alan Lightman wrote in June. He explores the ordinary miracle of human existence: https://theatln.tc/1DR5x8LF
Over the span of less than a century, discoveries in astronomy and biology have expanded our perspective almost beyond comprehension—if not as individuals, then at least as a civilization. “We have learned that our solar system sits on the outskirts of an enormous galaxy of a hundred billion stars called the Milky Way,” Lightman writes. “And the size of our galaxy is practically inconceivable … The mind reels from trying to imagine such expanse.” Humans have also enlarged their concept of time in the cosmos: “Against this backdrop of history, on Earth and in the cosmos, our individual lives are brief flickers in the chasms of time.”
“It is hard to imagine such a cavernous theater we find ourselves in,” Lightman writes. “But it is even more difficult to fathom how unique each of us is, how improbable, how lucky to be alive at all … 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.”
“We could not have had this grand perspective as recently as a century ago,” Lightman continues at the link. “So the question is: What are we to make of the fantastically improbable fact of our existence, our moment of life?”
📸: Will Matsuda
