Astronomical

Imagine a knock-out game of heads and tails where all 7 billion people on the planet take part. One correct call against your opponent and you go through to the next round. Give or take a preliminary round or two to sort out the numbers two people would eventually reach the final each having called the correct toss of the coin around 34 times in-a-row. It doesn't sound like much given the numbers involved but you try calling 34 consecutive correct calls of a coin. The odds are truly astronomical but even these odds pale into complete insignificance when compared against your very own existence.

For you to be reading this your natural parents had to meet each other and eventually get together at a particular minute on a particular day. Any other time would have produced another person entirely. Added to this, their parents, your four grandparents, had to meet then eventually get together on a particular day and time to create your parents and so on and so on back through the course of human history. Indeed back through pre-human history to birds, shrews, dinosaurs, fish, bacteria and even single cells. All the way back to the big bang and maybe before. Just one break in the chain of events in this universe's thirteen and a half billion year existence and you wouldn't be here reading this. That's astronomical! Winning the euro-millions is easy compared to any of that.

I watched a man die today. One minute he was sitting at a stool in a cafe with some friends drinking coffee and 5 minutes later he was dead. Probably a heart attack. The medics arrived and tried to resuscitate him but it was too late according to the electronic box and wires they attached to him which showed a straight line and two zeros. Thirteen and a half billion years of luck extinguished in the blink of an eye.

There's no rhyme nor reason to life. I'm convinced of that. It's just some cosmological accident on a grand scale and will barely register as a blip in the lifetime of this universe. (No pun intended). But what a blip it is to have lived it given the chances of ever existing at all. Enjoy every day as if it were your last, keep in touch with your loved ones and try not to piss too many people off along the way.