This Little Life of Mine

I guess I'll start by telling you a little about how I became interested in the topic.

Last summer, while visiting family in England, I bought a copy of Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything because I needed reading material for the remainder of our stay and the trip home. I was a bit skeptical about actually reading this book. The testimonial on the cover says,"... it's hard to imagine a better rough guide to science." My father, a civil engineer by profession and someone whom I would dub a "science guy", had heartily recommended it to me months before. I, however, am hardly a "science guy." I didn't make it through half a semester of high school chemistry, and only through the unbelievably kind heart of a professor did I manage to pass college geology-with something like a 40 percent average. So it was with some trepidation that I opened this book's pages.

I was absorbed by the end of the first chapter, however, and quickly learned that I needed to know next to nothing about science to appreciate it-in fact, to be awe-struck by the ideas it presented. If I had not been in awe of the cosmos before, I am most certainly now.

Though the book is more or less a history of all the sciences, I was most interested in those sections dealing with the great and the infinitesimal. The unimaginable vastness of space, and the unimaginable smallness of the atoms that collectively are us. I was also interested in Bryson's observations having to do with our human existence. On the one hand, millions of genetic mutations have had to occur over and over in a precise manner over billions of years for humans to have come into being. The tiniest deviation from any one of these, he writes, "and you might now be licking algae from cave-walls or lolling walrus-like on some stony shore." On the other hand, chemically-speaking, the story is pretty mundane: We are made of "carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, a little calcium, a dash of sulphur, a light dusting of other very ordinary elements... and that's all..." We are both miraculous and mundane. We live in a world too immense to begin to imagine, yet we are made of particles too small to conceptualize. It's these paradoxical truths that I find interesting to ponder.

Pardon the understatement, but it's a huge world we live in. Bryson points out that Carl Sagan figured that there are as many as ten billion trillion planets in the universe. And these planets are so lightly scattered through space that, and I quote Sagan, "If (you) were randomly inserted into the universe, the chances that you would be on or near a planet would be less than one in a billion trillion." Sagan concluded, "Worlds are precious." I am struck by this remark. If each of these billion, trillion planets is but a miniscule speck in this vast world, one would tend to see each as relatively insignificant. But "worlds are precious," Sagan says. What an interesting perspective. It's almost counter-intuitive. He does not say, "Worlds are expendable," or "Worlds are negligible," or "Worlds are insignificant." But: "Worlds are precious."

It leads one to ask: And what of each tiny life on one of these tiny planets? Each life is a mere speck on the speck of the universe. (Again, I make a gross understatement.) Does this make each one less significant in the grand scheme of the cosmos? Or does it make each one more precious? One could make a case for both.

When you think about it, our lives are pretty insignificant-speaking in terms of the grand scheme of the cosmos. For instance, think about a supernova. A huge star explodes, giving off the energy of a hundred billion suns or, as one person has put it, "a trillion hydrogen bombs going off at once." (p. 52) Think about two grains of dust colliding after one of these explosions, microscopic specks that collided with more specks until they formed this great planet of ours. It's rather inconceivable. Meanwhile, here we are, we mere humans, running to the drugstore for toothpaste, reading the back of a cereal box as we eat our breakfast, going to the carwash on a mild winter's day. We've surely got nothing on the stars.

Who among us has not felt that harsh reality at one time or another? Who has not felt tiny and insignificant? Is there anyone who has not gone about their daily routine and thought, "What's the purpose of it all?" We are powerless against so many things. We are often not even in control of the course of our own lives, let alone the forces of nature. We know that hunger and poverty ravage a huge portion of the world's people, that wars are being fought; there's terrorism, violence, any number of human-created evils. It's enough to make one sometimes throw up one's hands and say, "I can't possibly make a difference in all this. So what am I here for?"

We are small. Most of us will never be widely-known for performing heroic deeds. Most of us live our lives quietly, relatively unknown. We are aware, like George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life, that our lives affect the lives and well-being of our loved ones. But, generally speaking, this is not far-reaching. We are each a mere speck of dust in the unimaginably vast universe.

Strangely, this is a rather comforting notion to me. It is reassuring to me to know that, even through some unfortunate blunder, I cannot possibly explode and release the energy of a trillion hydrogen bombs at once. No matter how much I stumble and mess up, no matter how many mistakes I make-and believe me, they are numerous on any given day-I feel relatively certain that the universe is not going to be affected by it. The earth will continue in her orbit around the sun, and all her inhabitants will wake up to a new day.

Our lives are insignificant and small. Most of us will be forgotten a few generations hence. If we are lucky, we will leave some legacy-a work of art, a discovery, a garden, descendants. But in just a handful of years, each one of us will be gone from living memory. We move through this life quickly and quietly.

I wonder about this, though. I wonder if because our lives are so small that each life is also that much more precious. Recall Sagan's notion that, "if (someone) were randomly inserted into the universe, the chances (of being) on or near a planet would be less than one in a billion trillion." I invite you to imagine how much slimmer the chance is of being on or near one of these tiny little lives. "Worlds are precious," Sagan notes. Doesn't it follow logically that so, too, is each life? As a whole, we take up an impossibly small fraction of the space that's out there. Each one of us is, indeed, an exquisite commodity.

Personally, it's not often that I see myself and my life in this way. Rarely do I stop and think about my life's place in the universe. As the parent of two young children, it's all I can do to get through the day without forks being flushed down the toilet or teeth being knocked out. Our cats are months overdue for their shots, I am at least as long overdue for a dental appointment, we've had burst pipes to deal with, stomach bugs, cars that won't start, computers that won't behave, email coming at a rate I can't keep up with, and I haven't balanced the checkbook in months. You know the story. I don't need to spell it out. Contemplating life and its significance ranks low on my to-do list, and quite possibly on yours too.

Yet one day last summer, I sat in the home of my inlaws in the English countryside, absorbed in a book I thought I had no business reading, and I read those words that I shared with you earlier-you know, the passage in which Bill Bryson presents the odds of each of your ancestors surviving and procreating until it came to you. And suddenly it dawned on me: It really is quite spectacular that I ever came to be. Miraculous, even.

I understood for the first time-and maybe I'm just a late bloomer-that the odds of any of us being here are, in a way, quite slim. Given that, I began to feel that I had a responsibility to be more appreciative of it. It's a little life, yes, but it's all I've got and it's a wonder that I've got it.

This little life of mine. I do not give thanks for it nearly enough. I do not tend to it as much as it deserves. I do not ask often enough if I am using it to its full advantage, if I am doing all that I can with it. In short, I am not taking seriously enough my responsibility-my responsibility for treating this life as a wonderful and precious thing.

Oh, but if I did. If I took this responsibility more seriously, I would offer thanks often for so many things. I would take fewer things for granted. I would say thank you for the love of my children and my spouse, my whole family-for this is indeed the most miraculous thing of all after life itself. I would say thank you for the companionship of friends, new and old, those who have faded away and returned and even those who have faded away for good. I would say thank you to whomever would listen for the strange luck that put me here at this time and in this place-for the freedom to express myself and to vote, to drink clean water, to be surrounded by exquisite natural beauty, trees galore, marshes, beaches, an occasional moose. I would join my children in their unbounded joy in dancing, painting, and dinosaurs. Their joy can be infectious, but there's many a time that I simply feel waves of melancholia as I consider that soon they, too, will be grown and not so easily enchanted by such things. I would say thank you, thank you, for hands that can make and break bread and a mind that, albeit unscientifically, can contemplate the heavens.

If I took this responsibility more seriously, I would more often ask myself if I am making the most of my life. However you look at it, my little life will not make a big impact on the world. But I can choose to do something. I should ask myself if I am doing all that I can to make the world a better place-if I am acting out of kindness and compassion, if I am relating authentically to people rather than trying to save face, if I am working for justice instead of somehow contributing to injustice. I will not be able to solve the world's problems, but I can certainly reach out to people, make someone's life a little better, provide some comfort to someone who needs it, and in this way, alleviate the world's troubles by the tiniest bit. I need to make the most of my life.

I see it as my responsibility, and I have work ahead of me: to remind myself to not take my life for granted. It's a little life, mine and yours and everyone else's. But it begs to be appreciated and utilized and treated as the exquisite thing that it is.

A young boy gave the order to his parents: You be glad at that star. It's sage advice, and there for our taking. May we heed it, at least on occasion, each one of us. Be glad for that star-for its brilliance, its potential power, and its place in the vastness of the cosmos. Be glad for the awe its mere existence can inspire when we stop to think about it. And be glad for its reminder that we are no less inspiring, no less brilliant, and that each of our lives no less of a miracle.

Julie Parker Amery