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Consider the warmth of the body in the chill of the night. Self-contained, a furnace; heat, the presence of life. We glow in the infrared. Our coupling makes us glow the brighter, and we appear to merge with one another. The backdrop for this is the cold eternity of interstellar space. This backdrop is the unknown. It is not unknowable, but it is far too great to comprehend in its entirety. Wheresoever we may roam in this universe, which has no boundary, it shall be as the center of it all.

Wherever you go, there you are.

But who are we? What is our history? What is our path, and how has it been determined? From protean, simplest life, we arose. In infinitesimal increments, by accident and, eventually, by intentional effort, by hook and by crook even, we found ourselves standing. Here. On the good earth. On the cruel ground. On this indifferent planet. And we proclaimed our will and ourselves in tools, in rituals of birth and burial, in artistic representation. We found our meaning in these things, and by these things we created a different world, a symbolic world. In our symbols we cached our sense of reality, found ways to communicate more and more complex ideas. History unfurled slowly until, at last, we began to map its roiling undulations, to illuminate (though still but dimly) that which forever falls away behind us.

After some 13.5+ billions of years, I, who have but one life that has endured so far for approximately 1/313,953,488th of the universe’s timeline,—I wrote:

I really do love the world. For all its pain, its sorrows and tragedy; I still love it. The full experience of being human, being alive, being conscious of this ongoing experience, is meaningful to me in a way that fills me with a sense of love. I cannot maintain such a state indefinitely; life’s pain intrudes, wounds, pulls me down at times. But even in the depths of such illness, such dis-ease as torments the mind with fear and repulsion, there is something profoundly grand about it all that makes me long for life. The worst storms pass. The worst pains end. One day, it will all be gone. And so I continue fighting for the joy, trying to find it, trying to make it, trying to share it. And I love that this is so. I don’t want “heaven”; don’t think the world is “hell”. I want this. I want the way you feel when we hug each other; want the way we feel together when we make love; want the passion of friendship more intimate than death itself. I love this world. All of it. I accept the challenge and will learn to fly without a net. And when I die I will be succored by all we shared and all I learned from you, and you, and you. It matters nothing to me that nothing follows. I love this now, and will until I’m gone forever.

This, then, is a meditation upon my human experience. It is different for everyone, and I am amazed at all the stories I come across, saddened somewhat to consider how many lives I will never even hear about. This life I have is the legacy of all that came before that had even the remotest influence on events. That I am here, who I am, could never have been predicted. The odds are, literally, astronomical. For any one of us to go back to the beginning of time and to guess where any atom would wind up, or to work backwards from now to the beginning, to predict where the atoms of our bodies came from…. It boggles the mind. And yet we can conceive of such a journey. We can turn our mind’s eye to the chance of it and grok the absurd odds of it. We are here, human, conscious; imperfect and mortal and dependent on so much for our existence. We are here, though. Present tense. For now, we exist. We have perdured as a species. The odds are that we will not do so forever. It will all pass away. But not yet.

Is that not enough on its own to shake us awake, to invigorate or refresh our passion for life, for living, to inspire us to aspire to more? From the murky depths of our prehistory our ancestors yet reach forward. Not in a teleological sense, but simply and profoundly as the impetus to live. Only, now we have the ability to define just what it means “to live”. We have the ability to define what is meaningful to us. We have the ability to order our internal representation of the world. I think it is fair to say that humankind is, by nature, the architect of its own meaning, and I think that it has been this way since the moment in our history when first we conceived the abstract idea,—that “We are here”.