From this angle, your life can look really small and insignificant.
And even here on Earth, it can feel like you and your identity are inconsequential.
But if you look closer at the facts, you'll see that your life was astonishingly, breathtakingly unlikely.
For example, a man might produce as many as 525 billion sperm cells over a lifetime, but only a fraction will be viable. Yours was viable.
And of the 1 or 2 million eggs a woman will produce in her lifetime, only about 400 will ever mature to viability.
And even when an egg is fertilized, the egg has a 50/50 chance of surviving long enough for the woman to even know she is pregnant.
And remember, your parents had to meet first. They had to meet on a planet that is currently home to over 7 billion people.
And then they had to get together at a very particular moment to make you, which had a 1 in 400 quadrillion chance of happening.
Now imagine all of that happening in every generation for the last 60,000 years or so that Homo sapiens have been around.
Remember, surviving infancy and childhood used to be much more rare, but all of your ancestors made it.
And before they all survived childhood, they were part of an unbroken lineage from the single-cell organisms that emerged in the waters of the Earth to becoming human. That process was 4 billion years in the making.
From the mysterious cosmic structure of the dark universe, you managed to emerge.
That small and seemingly inconsequential life of yours is a miracle; your very existence is proof that you matter.
And that doesn't mean that you have to be grateful all the time or always feel that you're special. It just means that you belong here.
And because everyone you will ever meet is also a cosmic impossibility, treat your encounters with the gentleness and awe that the unlikely meeting of any two miracles on an uncertain journey deserves.
