Just our luck

…Being alive at all is the most extraordinary stroke of good luck we will ever experience. Yet it is the easiest to overlook, to take for granted. We wake up in the morning, have our coffee, make breakfast, send the kids off to school, go to our jobs, move through our routines, worry about deadlines, check off items on our to-do list. And we forget that beneath all of it lies something profoundly rare: existence itself. The simple fact that we are here, conscious and aware, is so unlikely that it borders on the miraculous. Because we experience that miracle every day, we treat it as ordinary, even guaranteed, mostly unnoticed at all. We postpone joy, assuming there will always be more time. We don’t see the beauty in small moments. We simply go about the business of life, without taking a second to notice life itself. In making this comment, I am aware that in the time-driven, frantic pace of our world today, many people do not It is almost impossible to wrap our heads around such things. We could not have had this grand perspective as recently as a century ago. And we have found it not through Prince Henry’s ships but through our laboratories, our telescopes, and our minds. So the question is: What are we to make of the fantastically improbable fact of our existence, our moment of life? Or, as Mary Oliver asks in the last lines of her poem “The Summer Day”: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life.” I can speak only for myself. First of all, gratitude ought to replace entitlement. Gratitude not only for my great good fortune in a long chain of accidents, but gratitude to the individual human beings who have helped me along the way. Some years ago, I went to a Buddhist meditation retreat and learned about the concept of the “retinue,” a constellation of mentors that one imagines hovering nearby. Attempting to put this beautiful idea into practice, I collected the photographs of a couple dozen people who have guided me in my life—parents, high-school teachers, college teachers, music teachers, rabbis, colleagues. Some had already passed away. I made a poster of the images and hung it above my desk. Each day, I look up at the poster and give gratitude. It seems like a simple thing, but the gesture helps me position myself in the world, helps me slow down and take a moment to acknowledge my good fortune as the recipient of caring attention and the good fortune of simply being alive. Two millennia ago, the Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius understood the fragility of life when he wrote in his Meditations: “Whatever you do, whatever you project, so do and so project as one who may at this very moment depart out of this life.” With my one brief moment, I can try to make the world a slightly better place. Gratitude without action is empty. The mentors hovering above my desk all gave me something. Although I cannot return the favor to each of them individually, I can return it to the world. I can attempt to pass on the kindness and good faith and caring. There is an irony here. As each of us dwindles in size by comparison to the cosmic stretches of space and of time, our individual lives, our improbable existence becomes more and more important. With the understanding of my great good fortune, I also feel a sense of responsibility. But to whom, or to what, am I responsible? Not the universe, which is without mind. And not the huge number of human beings who could have been but never were. I can hardly be responsible to people who do not exist. I believe it is a responsibility to myself—to not waste my precious life. In the immense hallways of time and of space, out of the fantastic number of potential lives and the infinite chain of accidents that led to this moment, I am here. I breathe. I see. I feel. I experience this grand spectacle of a cosmos I find myself in. That is not a thing to be wasted, or left unobserved. Alan Lightman Notes: A longer version of this essay was published in the Atlantic on June 2, 2026 https://open.substack.com/pub/alanlightman1/p/the-ordinary-miracle-of-existing?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios