As I was driving home this evening from my usual Thursday night dinner with my parents, my mind meandered again, how it often does these days, to thoughts of the infinite possibilities that led to my being. The single outcome of who am I, what I am doing with my life, my personality, the choices I make, my entire being. Thinking about this is ultimately beyond comprehension but I find it fun to try and wrap my mind around. In daily life you run across so many choices that have so many different outcomes that could alter your life in seemingly minute to massive ways. This is the idea of the metaphorical (or not?) concept behind the butterfly effect (butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon, causes hurricane in Florida due to currents in the wind being built upon, etc etc etc).
What started make me think more though was that it’s not just actions one takes but also the inactions that are equally powerful. This leads to the fact that I have to be appreciative of all the men and women who were equally inactive enough to let my parents end up together and eventually lead to me. But multiply that times a a mere few generations, the exact circumstances that each successive person was born in just the compatible way to find another person to have a child at the exact moment they did with all the external factors placed on them and all the other possible people vying but failing to be that mate, and that one sperm with its DNA just so to give A properties, B personality, C looks to get the right circumstances for the next generation and you have to realize that the probability of me is so infinitesimally small that we could safely say through math that I cannot possibly exist. Yet here I am. I am the tinniest probability of compounded possibilities in a dynamic ever morphing world. Now stretch that back to the beginning of the universe, through the formation of the planet, to the most basic life on earth of some group of self assembling proteins to bacteria, to multi-cellular organisms, to animals and eventually to us animals, humans. To this exact moment I sit at my computer and type this.
Every step of the way led to your and my existence, against all the odds it is you reading this, right now.
Some may argue, without realizing this is the argument they really use, that this is the proof of why there has to be a god, as how can we possibly exist against such odds. How could we have possibly evolved from monkeys, monkeys from marmots, marmots from rodents, etc etc, all the way back to the first semblance of life and before? I agree, the odds do seem impossible, but there must be the one final outcome that results. We and every living thing around us are that outcome, compounded, multiplied and squared to the power of infinity. That single, precious outcome of the thing we call life, of consciousness of being. And yet so many of us squander it, throw it away in wars and petty feuds over ultimately nothing.
It was here at this thought that I realized something. As abhorrent as some of the atrocities committed in the world were/are, I have to at the same time account for them in my thinking. For it is those crimes, violence, wars that led to my existence too. If the Ottoman Empire hadn’t extended into Greece and enslaved my ancestors then likely my great^8 grandmother wouldn’t have met my great^8 grandfather and decide to have children which would eventually lead to this present of me.
So as bizarre and backwards as it sounds, in a way I could say that I’m thankful to the Turks for enslaving my country, because without that I would not exist. Was it morally right, no. Did it undoubtedly cause suffering and pain for millions, absolutely. Would I change history if I could? Only if I could exist again in this same present. It feels so selfish to admit this truth, yet it is just that. I love life, I love living, I love being able to live. Even in my most saddened times I try to find solace that I’ve even been given the opportunity and privilege to be sad*.
So where did all this thinking lead me? It means that no matter what I decide to do with my life, no matter how I decide to live, what choices, what actions I take and don’t take, that at some point in the future, there will be some other individual whose life will have been intertwined in some minute yet paramount significant detail that will thank me, regardless of who I was**. If I die tomorrow, some woman who I would have married and had kids with, will marry and have kids with someone else, and that child will be the product of an improbability as well, becoming tied into the infinite stream of life’s possibilities that I was honoured to be a part of, hopefully to one day think back and reflect on all the events, people, creatures, bacteria, protein, atoms, and quarks that led to them, there, at that exact moment.
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* Usually doesn’t work, but once in a while it holds off me being angry at some of the smaller things that try to get me down hahaha
** I don’t say this and mean it to be taken as I have no reason to be morally right or don’t care about how I may hurt others by my actions, I am merely stating that all events, right/wrong/indifferent have an outcome that influences the future. A morality discussion is for another day!