The miracle of life
With the old year preparing to leave and 2008 waiting in the
wings, it is an appropriate time to take stock of our lives and
desires.
Many of us lost someone we cherished in 2007, whether a family
member or close friend, and few of us have had a perfect year.
The miracle of life
With the old year preparing to leave and 2008 waiting in the wings, it is an appropriate time to take stock of our lives and desires.
Many of us lost someone we cherished in 2007, whether a family member or close friend, and few of us have had a perfect year. Frustration is part of the human condition but learning to live with and overcome it has been instilled in us since Man first stood upright, looked around and decided that caves made better homes than trees did. It is a miracle that any of us exists at all. Each mortal is unique. Consider for a moment the thousands of generations that developed over countless millennia to produce you. If just one of your forbears had been different, you would have never been born.
If, for instance, one of your great-great grandfathers had not by chance met one of your great-great grandmothers and they had not chosen to make their lives together, there would have been no you. Multiply that chance by thousands of earlier generations and you can begin to get a glimmering of the miracle that is you.
While you muse upon that, take into account also the almost infinitesimal odds against your conception and birth. We learned in biology class the incredible saga of one egg being fertilized out of hundreds of thousands to produce you, the reader, and it was so for every one of the billions of people now living or who have ever lived on this teeming planet.
Life is the greatest gift, no matter how unsatisfactory it may seem at times. The ancients realized that, and that knowledge has been reaffirmed over and over through the centuries. Each generation succeeds another and in its turn is succeeded by another, again and again since the beginning of recorded time. That is the glory of Mankind; that it endures no matter the number of wars, or pestilence, accidents, and calamities that claimed many of our ancestors.
Review this year that is ending now and you will realize how many joys each of us has had – the birth of a child in our own family or a friend’s, the accomplishments achieved by our loved ones and even the day-to-day comforts we tend to take for granted..
All of Adam’s line has faced those disasters and most have survived them. Occasionally there is an Attila, Napoleon, Hitler or Stalin but we also have been enriched by Homer, Sappho, Shakespeare and Lincoln.
Consider the advance of humanity from the first fire builders to the point where we are making plans to colonize the planets and are probing the mysteries of the universe. Think upon the beauty Man has created over the centuries and continues to do so despite all the horror and suffering for which he is also responsible.
Man will continue to progress, to achieve, to prevail against all odds. The preacher in Ecclesiastes summed it up best: “One generation passeth away, and another cometh, but the earth abideth forever.”
