A billion-to-one
I sat down this morning to write. For once I couldn’t find a good enough excuse to put it off. I’d even scheduled it in my work calendar. But I know myself too well. Like all the photographs I take but never post, I harbour bold intentions and less than impressive follow-through when it comes to publishing.
I could feel the procrastination moving in me… I opened LinkedIn “for just a quick look” and saw a post shared by my old mate Rob. Truth be told, I have no idea whether he knew the author of the piece or whether he chanced upon it, but it is a beautiful, bittersweet call to gratitude from a man named Simon Boas, and well worth 5 minutes of your life to read.
“Of all the billions of people in the world, your parents met and merged. And of all the sperm and eggs they produced – this is a billion-to-one shot just on its own – the only two that would make YOU fused and multiplied. If the moment you were conceived had been any different at all – a week later; a bottle of Blue Nun soberer – you wouldn’t have been born.” – Simon Boas, 2024
I think we accept that certain moments are miraculous. Childbirth, the near-miss car crash, the perfectly kicked goal. But I think we often forget that we are also miraculous. That the conditions that arose to form planet earth, to see complex life forms take root, for life to have evolved into something wildly new after each mass-extinction event, let alone for each one of us to be conceived, to be born, and to live out a lifetime on this amazing planet is just the MOST insane set of probabilities. Quite beyond the average human to even comprehend.
It’s easy to be awed by the greatness and the vastness of it all. Why do we matter at all? Maybe we don’t matter. Lots of people will tell you that.
But maybe…we do.
In my work I encourage people to recognise and embrace the things that make them who they are - a one-of-a-kind human – and invite them to consider living with the confidence of a being that is entirely on-purpose.
Whether we believe that this is all by grand design or by happy accident, one thing still seems pretty clear to me. We have a responsibility to do our best with our life. To live it like it does matter, and to try and be conscious of as much of it as possible. To assume that we are exactly what, who, and where we should be.
The people I know who are most alive are the ones who accept some relationship with death. Who have seen it, who have sensed its closeness, those who have danced with it and come back for another go-round. Because having a relationship with death is both a privilege and the key to aliveness. It gives us a way to connect to the joy, the vibrancy, the beauty, the opportunity in each moment. It reminds us that we never will know when our time is up and simultaneously spikes our appetite for life.
The Buddha invited us to contemplate death and impermanence as a tool for living and giving our best and for appreciating the preciousness of this existence.
If you are curious about the benefits of such a practice, I invite you to ask yourself this: If I had one month/six months/a year left in this life of mine, how would I choose to live? What would I embrace? What would I walk away from?
How would this moment or day at work or stack of emails be if I knew life was finite? How would my relationships be with loved ones, or family, or strangers?
Whether as a one-off exercise or a committed practice, the outcome is illuminating.
Confronting? Perhaps. Life-changing? Certainly.
Miraculous. Precious. One-of-a-kind. You are.
