The Lucky Ones

The death of someone you know - in this case a guy here in Deepest Bavaria whom I knew from the music scene and folk music sessions - has unpredictable effects on your thoughts.

In this case I have found myself thinking of the strikingly powerful start to Richard Dawkins' book 'Unweaving the Rainbow':

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.

It does indeed make us the lucky ones when you think where we came from and how we came to be - an egg from your mother, a sperm from your father...

That's amazing enough as it stands but when you factor in some of the numbers ...ok, your mother would have produced about one egg a month but your father may have been bombarding those monthly eggs with quadrupillions of sperm; and all of these eggs and sperm contained a little package of chromosomes which could provide a unique collection of physical, anatomical, mental and psychological attributes. Each egg, each sperm with a slightly different mix, making you very very very (my ability to calculate probabilities is at the heads-or-tails level but even I know that the word 'very' back there should be repeated an astronomic number of times - but let's make do with three) unlikely to exist - but you do.

You reading this blog is the proof that you have made it - my writing it is proof that I am still hanging on here. There's this little slice of existence we are fortunate enough to be experiencing - it must be better than no existence at all...

Anyway, it makes me think that it's not so much a case of carpe diem but carpe your bleedin' vitam.