Covid19 Update #4: 23 March, 2020
It will take a miracle to overcome the Covid19 Pandemic but fortunately, we are surrounded everywhere by countless miracles. To me, a miracle is a highly improbable event that brings about beauty and joy. An event that is so improbable that it required some intervention from beyond the natural world. A miracle has two parts: the event and the receiver. Without both, you don’t have a miracle. A highly improbable event can only be a miracle if it brings about recognized beauty and joy. In other words, in order for you to have a miracle, you have to participate in it.
The first step to participate in a miracle is to recognize the miracle of your own life. The fact that you are here reading these words is a miracle of unmeasurable proportions. If you try to calculate the odds of your dad meeting your mom and that their meeting would lead to a child it would undoubtedly be one in millions upon millions. If you then add to the calculation that their meeting would lead to your birth that was the result of one specific sperm fertilizing one specific egg out of the many thousands of eggs and billions of sperm, the odds rapidly approach zero.
But we’re not done yet. We also have to reduce the odds by the probability that you are part of a lineage that has remained unbroken since the beginning of human existence and each chain in that lineage was the result of the joining of one specific sperm with one specific egg. If you could calculate such a probability it would probably be less likely than one in the number of atoms in the Universe.
Of course, we wouldn’t be done yet. We’d also have to figure in the odds that humans evolved from single-cell animals and that any life at all existed on Earth. We’d also have to calculate the odds that the Earth would be placed at the perfect distance from the sun and contained all the ingredients necessary for life. The list would go on and on. What it would all point to is the mathematical certainty that the odds of you actually being here reading these words is basically zero. It would point to the mathematical certainty that you are, in fact, a miracle.
We are all miracles. Every person we encounter every day is a miracle. But they only are perceived to us as a miracle when we see the beauty and joy that they bring into the world. We need to embrace the certainty that everyone we encounter (in person or virtually) is a miracle even the person who flips us off in traffic, the telephone scammer, and the troll who spews nonsense on the internet. Underneath all our human imperfections is a perfect miracle.
One of the ways we will get through this crisis is to strive to live in a state of constant recognition, acknowledgment, and embracement of the miraculous awe that surrounds us. To be in constant recognition of the awesomeness of every living creature, the planet, and the Universe. To be in constant recognition of the miracle of life and to strive to participate in that miracle. To be in constant recognition that we belong to something infinitely larger than we perceive as ourselves.
We will get through this crisis by realizing that we need to all do our part to protect the countless miracles that we could possibly infect through our own inattention or carelessness. We will get through this by remembering that we are one single worldwide family of incredible miracles.
