"We are going to die
and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die
because they're never going to be born. The potential people who
could have been here in my place, but who will, in fact, never see
the light of day, outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. ...In the face
of these stupefying odds, it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that
are here. Here's another respect in which we are lucky. The universe
is older than a hundred million centuries. Within a comparable time,
the sun will swell to a red giant and engulf the earth. Every century
of hundreds of millions has been in its time, or will be when its
time comes, the present century. The present moves from the past to
the future like a tiny spotlight inching its way along a gigantic
ruler of time. Everything behind the spotlight is in darkness, the
darkness of the dead past. Everything ahead of the spotlight is in
the darkness of the unknown future. The odds of your century being
the one in the spotlight are the same as the odds that a penny,
tossed down at random, will land on a particular ant crawling
somewhere on the road from New York to San Francisco. You are lucky
to be alive and so am I." (from Unweaving the Rainbow)
We are lucky to be alive
and therefore we should value life. Life is precious. We're never
going to get another one. This is it. Don't waste it. Open your eyes.
Open your ears. Treasure the experiences that you have and don't
waste your time fussing about a non-existent future life after you're
dead. Try to do as much good as you can now to others. Try to live
life as richly as possible during the time that you have left
available to you.
http://www.alternet.org/stories/46566/
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