None of This Could Have Happened At All

Appreciating the miracle of life

Hi friends,

The other day on the train, I had one of those quiet realizations about the miracle of life, the kind that always seem to show up when I'm on the move.

The latest: it’s wild to think how precarious every life is. How one near miss, one accident, one unplanned moment became the start of a whole new generation. For example, a baby isn’t planned, yet she arrives, then has a family of her own, and one of her children solves X problem, or saves a child on the verge of death.

For me, I often think of how my mom had breast cancer, the same disease that claimed her mother’s life, and somehow still had me. Behind each life is a long string of coincidences and chance: close calls, wrong turns that somehow became the right ones. The miracle isn’t just that we’re here. It’s that we’re here at all.

When I see a picture of Earth from far away, or an image of the Milky Way from far away, I’m once again reminded of this fact. Somehow, we’ve here at all.

It’s humbling, sometimes frightening, when you look back at the chain of events that led to us being here. So much rests on chance, on accidents, on timing.

There are so many threads like this: near misses, last-minute changes, tragedies narrowly avoided, miracles we don’t even see as miracles in the moment. It makes you wonder how many other branches almost happened, and how many other versions of our lives could have unfolded.

Yet this is the one that did. Maybe that’s the greatest miracle: out of infinite possibilities, we landed here, in this life, breathing this air, loving these people, living through these days. That realization, that fragile improbability of it all, is where peace begins.

It’s staggering when you pause and trace the threads back. How many generations of near-misses and unplanned turns added up to this? This exact moment, this breath, this love, this life.

How many of our ancestors almost never met? How many ancestors were nearly claimed by illness, war, famine, heartbreak, but weren’t? How many close calls happened that we’ll never know about: a car that narrowly missed, a house that didn’t burn, a decision at a crossroads that felt trivial at the time but changed everything?

Maybe that’s the miracle. Not that life is orderly or fair or guaranteed, but that it survives, generation after generation, on razor-thin margins. That out of billions of possibilities — maybe even trillions? more? — this chain held. We are the culmination of chance and grit and blind luck and stubborn hope.

Perhaps the way to honor that isn’t to chase perfection, but to simply be, to sit in the sun, to laugh a little at dinner, to hold the people we love just a little closer, remembering how easily none of it could have happened at all.

With love,

Matthew