I am not sure if you’ve ever heard the song Miracle by Freddy Mercy and Queen, but it is worth the time. I don’t mind if you stop reading, and disappear to take a listen. I’ll just wait right here. I’ll wait as long as necessary. Take all the time you need to see what a miracle life is. To see how blessed you are to be alive. How blessed we are to know you.
In her TEDx talk, Mel Robbins marvelled at what scientists believe to be the odds of being born, and that number weighs in at a staggering four trillion to one.
4,000,000,000,000 : 1.
10 to the power of 12.
Soak that in for a moment. I’ll wait.
4,000,000,000,000 : 1.
Dr. Ali Binazir takes the calculations a little further. He looked at the statistical odds of a boy meeting a girl and of that that same girl becoming pregnant. He also looked at the astronomically overwhelming odds of the right sperm finding the right egg, and finally, the odds that all of your ancestors reproduced successfully over time.
This brought him to the conclusion that Mel Robbins marvelled a bit low.
The true odds are 10 to the power of 2,685,000.
Not 10 to 12.
10 to the power of 2,685,000!
That’s ten multiplied over and over and over and over and over again. Two million, six hundred, and eighty five thousand times. Over and over and over again.
Now that’s a lot of zeros.
But why is it that we refuse to carry the one?
Why don’t you see yourself as part of the great equation.
Why is it that you ignore and dismiss how great you are?
What a miracle it is for you to be alive?
If life is a miracle and it is, you have much to be grateful for.
There is much for you to do. Much to get excited over. Much to forget, for sure. Much to forgive and a whole lot more living and loving still undone.
Every time I hear the song Miracle I begin to marvel.
I marvel at the fact that a lowly Franciscan priest, in the death camps of Auschwitz, volunteered and gave up his life so that another man could return to his wife and children.
I marvel at Mahatma Gandhi, who was willing to starve to death, so that his Hindu and Muslim brothers and sisters didn’t kill each other any more.
I marvel that Nelson Mandela chose to sit in prison for twenty seven long years, because he was unwilling to trade his uncomfortable jail cell for a bigger one.
I marvel at a young man, on the east coast of Canada, who when diagnosed with an incurable cancer, decided to go for a run. A run which has united a nation and has given life and hope to so many others.
I marvel a lot.
I marvel a lot more ever since I’ve decided I was a miracle.
I marvel at the silly things that make me laugh.
I marvel at what musicians can do with seven notes. I marvel at what painters can do with three primary colours. I marvel at what writers can do with twenty six letters of the alphabet.
I marvel at all the poems. All the movies. All the animals that bring so much to our lives. At all the great recipes that have been passed down over the generations.
I marvel at the places we have been and I dream of places we will go.
I also marvel and want to thank whoever invented cheesecake.
You are not an insignificant number.
You are not a petty grain of sand in the ocean of time.
You are not another number in an endless, unsolvable equation.
You are a miracle, whose existence outnumbers all the atoms in the universe.
Isn’t it time you started to act like one?
Cover photo generously provided by photographer Sadik Kuzu via unsplash.com
