..thermodynamic miracles.. events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. i long to observe such a thing.
and yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter..
..until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, and only you, that emerged.
to distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold..that is the crowning unlikelihood.
the thermodynamic miracle.
"but if me, my birth, if that's a thermodynamic miracle.. i mean, you could say that about anybody in the world!!"
yes.
anybody in the world.
but the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget.
i forget.
we gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. yet seen from another's vantage point, as if new, it may still take the breath away.
come.. dry your eyes, for you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly.
dry your eyes..
..and let's go home.
..Growing up happens in a heartbeat. One day you're in diapers, the next day you're gone. But the memories of childhood stay with you for the long haul. I remember a place, a town, a house, like a lot of houses. A yard like a lot of other yards. On a street like a lot of other streets. And the thing is, after all these years, I still look back...with wonder.