You probably didn’t wake up this morning amazed that you exist. Most of us don’t, and that is a shame.
Instead, we wake up thinking about the alarm. The commute. The meeting we’re already running late for. The email we forgot to answer. Whether there’s enough coffee. That last one is a fair concern.
For most of us, existing tends to get lost in the details. But physicist and writer Alan Lightman invites us to zoom out (a lot) in his beautiful essay, The Ordinary Miracle of Existing. And here was see a beautiful overlap with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).
Lightman, like many in the ACT community, asks us to consider just how improbable each of our lives actually is.
Think about the enormous chain of events required for you to be reading this right now. Not just your parents meeting, but their parents meeting, and their parents before them. Generations of people had to survive illnesses, accidents, wars, migrations, chance encounters, and countless other forks in the road.
Go back far enough and the improbability becomes almost impossible to comprehend.
And yet, here you are.
Lightman approaches this partly as a scientist. Against the enormous scales of the universe and billions of years of cosmic history, one human life can seem impossibly small. But he arrives at an interesting paradox:
Perhaps recognizing how small we are doesn’t make our lives less meaningful.
Perhaps it makes this brief opportunity to be here even more precious. That’s where this becomes a wellness lesson. We talk a lot about gratitude as noticing the good things in our lives. That’s valuable. But Lightman pushes the idea one step further. Gratitude can also carry responsibility.
He describes keeping photographs of important mentors above his desk. Photos of people whose kindness, attention, and guidance helped shape his life. He cannot repay all of them directly. Some are no longer alive. So he tries to repay them forward. The people who taught us, the people who encouraged us, the people who loved us when we weren’t particularly easy to love, the colleague who noticed we were struggling, the stranger whose small kindness arrived on exactly the day we needed it.
We can’t always give those moments back, but we can give them to someone else. Maybe that’s one way to respond to the extraordinary accident of being here: notice it, appreciate it, and then do something with it.
The takeaway: You are here.
Against an almost unimaginable number of possibilities in which you weren’t, somehow you get this particular life, with these people, on this planet, at this moment. It won’t always be easy. It certainly won’t always feel miraculous. But it is yours to notice, and yours to use.
Today’s challenge: Take one ordinary moment today and actually experience it.
Look at someone you love. Step outside. Notice the sky. Laugh with a coworker. Feel your feet on the ground. For just a few seconds, don’t try to improve the moment. Just notice the remarkable fact that you’re here to have it.