2.5. You Are Incomprehensible

Life is an incomprehensible gift. 

'Incomprehensible' is not used here poetically. It is literal. 

Here is an intimate story of the beginning of your own existence:

Out of about 300 million sperm that occur in an average ejaculation into a vagina, only about three million, around one percent, enter the uterus. After swimming upstream to the fallopian tubes, penetrating natural acids, and fighting through the cervix, they reach a "divergence in the wood" where only one of the two fallopian paths lead to an egg. Still yet! White blood cell cilia divert hundreds of thousands, allowing only about 500 sperm to reach the egg, which still is protected by an outer shell. Yet, your sperm cell made it through, fertilizing the egg first and starting your individual life. 

At less than ten seconds old, you were already 1/300,000,000 — having survived a 99.99999997% chance of non-being.

Now think about the odds for the ten years prior that led to this critical point of your being. Before you were even born, your odds of existence were literally incomprehensible. To put this in less seminally microscopic terms, think of something you truly cherish: a friendship, an opportunity, a partner. The odds of you two finding each other in this time and this place are on another gigantic magnitude of probabilistic incomprehensibility.

There are countless paths of potentiality at any juncture, but out of the many, there only ever is one actuality, no matter how improbable. E pluribus unum. We live in the barely probable actuality which we casually call reality. We can either shrug this off or view it as an unfathomable marvel worthy of being honored.

These probabilities date back to our thousands of ancestors' long struggles and strife. Many of their paths may have been much more challenging than the cozy existence we enjoy today. Despite their hardship, they are irrevocably and fundamentally part of bringing you to today.

We didn't 'choose' our genes, the age in which we were born, our level of intellect, our appearances, our geography, or any of the other absolutely fundamental attributes that shape our existence. 

When contemplating this incomprehensibility, we may begin to see that our life, with all its genuine difficulty, is an incomprehensible gift. What is the natural response to receiving a genuine gift? Within the Causalistic lens, opportunities to give thanks begin to emerge constantly.

Fortunately, we cannot comprehend, and often forget, the profundity of these improbabilities — otherwise, one may be permanently stuck in paralyzing awe.

If you feel gratitude for any gift or gifts, perhaps dwell on such feelings and express them. You may cause more goodness and gratitude in the world. At the very least, such contemplations are an endless source of mesmerization.