how silly it is to be alive

accidentally existing, aggressively feeling it.

I was feeling small, down in the dumps, then I read Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything and my whole worldview shifted to a manic nihilism.

If you ever feel like you’re just not good enough, like you’re insignificant, it will serve you right to remember that you are nothing more than a temporary congregation of atoms that, for reasons beyond human comprehension, decided to form you instead of, say, a blade of grass or a rock. Congratulations! Against all cosmic and conceivable odds, you exist. You and I are here right now, living, breathing, belting Taylor Swift’s songs on the car. It’s marvelous and worrying and confusing all at the same time. We exist, we love, we worry, we have compassion and kindness for eachother and the world around us. We have built a home within a world within a planet and we have meaning. And yet, if we were to tear ourselves apart, atom by atom, we would be left with nothing but a fine, lifeless dust, dust that was never alive to begin with but that made us ourselves and millions of atoms that individually amount to little, but together, built our bodies, kept our blood rushing and became us. This, I’m aware, is an unsettling reminder that existence is both astonishingly intricate, amazingly funny and, of course, absurdly precarious.

The atoms that construct us do not care that we exist at this moment, for they do not even know what a moment is, time means nothing when you’re an atom. They are lifeless, mindless, and unaware of their contribution to the miracle of our consciousness. And yet, somehow, they have collectively arranged themselves in such a way that you and I can both sit here contemplating them on a random Monday afternoon. Even more baffling, these same ingredients that make all of this possible —carbon, hydrogen, oxygen—exist across the universe, but only in rare instances, like right now on Earth, do they decide to get together and create life.

All of this has been said before in a thousand ways in a thousand texts, so I guess my main question is why. Why is life so determined to be? Why is it determined to exist here and now? Why does it endure hardship, defy all improbability, and cling to existence with such stubbornness?

Why.

I don’t know. I really don’t. Maybe I never will. Maybe we’re not supposed to. Maybe us continuously asking is the question and the answer. Our wondering, our aching to understand life. Maybe the question is wrong. Perhaps the question is not “why are we alive?”, but “what makes us alive?”.

And maybe it’s the fact that we carry the universe forward. Not with purpose, maybe, but with our presence. With our stubborn kind of aliveness. To us, to our world, to our pets it doesn’t really matter that the atoms don’t care, or that time will do as time does and move past our very very brief time here. It just doesn’t matter, because, against all odds, we’re here now. It’s confusing and fleeting and absolutely insane. What a ridiculous, beautiful and silly thing it is to be a speck of dust with a favorite song. To be stardust with a grocery list and a million thoughts and a laugh that makes someone else laugh, too.

What a silly little miracle it is to be the tiniest blip in the whole universe, here only for the briefest moment, and choose to share your life with another blip. To open our home, our heart, our little time, to other specks of stardust, that are not even our own species, just furry, funny, warm alive things we love anyway, across all barriers of reason. What a heartbreaking, silly, loving thing to do. Knowing they’ll leave before us. Knowing it will break our hearts. And still, we love. We love and we grieve and we treasure memories, buy new collars and do it all over again.

How wondrous it is to be human. To get excited when a baby smiles back at us. To cry at books we’ve read a hundred times. To stop and take a picture of a rock because it looks like a butt. To tell someone “you have to try this,” or “you had to be there,” because something about being here has meaning, even when it doesn’t.

Maybe being alive is also crying in a hospital bathroom and then getting a coffee with your friends because they want to make you laugh, even if just for five minutes. Maybe it’s brushing your teeth even when it feels like bad luck’s working overtime on you. Maybe it’s people — tiny, breakable, beautiful specks of dust — choosing to sit beside you, tell you stories, and share whatever light they’ve got. It’s not always graceful, this being alive thing — but somehow, we keep doing it. And maybe that’s part of the wonder, too. To marvel, to feel, to sit quietly in the ether echoing a billion “I don’t knows” and still smile thinking — God, it’s good to be here.

It could be that as Bryson suggests, life has no ulterior motive beyond being, maybe the joke’s on us because it just does. That, I believe, is in itself its most mind blowing feature.

I firmly and desperately believe that despite existing only just because, being made by indifferent atoms and clinging to accidental survival, is nothing short of miraculous. And if that’s not a reason to appreciate the sheer weirdness of being alive, I don’t know what is.