A Million Trillion Things Had to Go Right

Recently I was talking with someone in his 80s about something many of us quietly wrestle with our entire lives - our image. The subtle way we monitor ourselves in the world. How am I coming across? Did I say the right thing? Did I upset someone? In therapy I often call this people pleasing, which sounds generous but it is often just anxiety trying to manage the emotional weather of the room. He was reflecting on how much of his life had been spent paying attention to how he was perceived by others when he paused and said something that shifted the whole conversation.

At some point in life, he said, you start asking a different question entirely. You stop asking how you’re coming across. You start asking something much bigger: ‘What’s the point?’

Not in a hopeless way. In a deeply honest way. When we are younger the point seems obvious. You build things. You create careers. You raise families. You try to accumulate something that looks like meaning from the outside. But later in life those markers start to look different. The question becomes quieter and more existential. What is the point of all this living? As we talked about it I found myself saying something out loud that I have felt for a long time but rarely articulate this clearly. The point might simply be that we are conscious. That we are here at all.

If you think about it for even a moment, the odds of any one of us existing are completely absurd. A million trillion things had to happen exactly as they did in order for you to be you. Your parents had to meet at the exact moment they did. Their parents had to meet. And their parents before them. One specific sperm had to meet one specific egg at one specific second. Change even one moment in that chain and you simply would not be here. Not someone slightly different. Not a slightly altered version of you. You just would not exist.

I think about this constantly when I look at Nash. A million trillion perfectly timed moments had to occur in order for me to be his mother. I had to be born into my exact family. I had to move to Virginia. I had to go to school there. I had to move home for graduate school. I had to meet Michael, who just happens to be from Rhode Island. We had to date for 8 years. We had to get married when we did. Every single decision and circumstance stacked one on top of another until eventually this exact child existed. Sometimes when I look at Nash it hits me that his entire existence depended on a chain of events so specific it almost feels impossible to comprehend. If one tiny variable anywhere along that path had been different, Nash would not be Nash. And I would not be his mom. Again, not a different version of him. Not a slightly different child. This exact little person would simply not exist.

When you really sit with that, it starts to change what you think the point of life even is. We spend so much of our lives believing the point is productivity. Achievement. Status. Building the right life in the right order. But the truth is you were already worthy when you were a baby doing absolutely nothing except breathing and existing. You did not earn existence. It was given to you.

That conversation with my 81 year old client reminded me that the real markers of a life well lived may have nothing to do with what we produce. In Internal Family Systems we talk about the qualities of the Self. Curiosity. Compassion. Courage. Calm. Clarity. Connection. Those are not achievements. They are ways of being. And maybe that is the real point of being here.

This life is a blip. A tiny flicker in the timeline of everything that has ever existed. And yet somehow we get to experience it. We get to be aware that we are alive. We get to feel things. We get to hold our children and laugh with our friends and keep learning things about ourselves (even in our 80s!!). That is extraordinary.

Which makes it a little wild how much time we spend worrying about our image, our productivity, or whether we are doing life correctly. When you zoom out far enough, the miracle was never what we built. The miracle was that we got to be here to experience anything at all.

And if you pause for a moment and really think about the exact chain of events that had to happen for you to exist, it starts to feel almost impossible.

So maybe the point is simpler than we make it. To be curious about yourself. To be compassionate with yourself and others. To have the courage to keep growing. To be conscious enough to notice that you are alive at all.

The real miracle is that we are here at all.