Dear random chance:

Thank you for giving rise to DNA, and making me a vehicle for a short time, one tiny part in an immense chain, for its continued propagation.

Thank you, random chance, for powering evolution, which has given me everything I am, over billions of years and quintillions of “dice rolls” and millions of species of life forms and tens of thousands of generations of humans.

Thank you, evolution, for my eyeballs, which see amazingly well, even though they don’t see quite as well as they could have if they weren’t revisions to the ones my ancient ancestors used to see underwater – but honestly, I don’t know the difference.

Thank you, evolution, for the big brain that, while it sometimes gets anxious or depressed, has allowed my species to collaborate, develop tools and language, take over the planet, and eventually invent the scientific method and mathematics, and through rigorous effort, learn and harness the laws of nature and physics and electricity until we’ve created systems for storing our words in pulses of electricity and magnetism, transmitting them over great distances, and devices to encode them with using our fingers, like the phone I’m typing this on, and the internet and device the reader is reading on.

Thank you, evolution, for my body which stands upright and looks to the stars, for its fingers and toes and joints and muscles, that are so adaptable and capable of infinite variations of position and movement. Thank you for the aforementioned big brain that is able to learn to control and execute all of these movement patterns, as well as project forward in time to trace the ballistic path of a projectile that leaves my hand to where it will eventually land. Members of my species can walk, run, swim, climb, jump, throw things, kick things, contort our bodies into yoga positions, spin and flip through the air with the grace and precision of a gymnast or a dancer, develop their muscles til they can lift multiple times their own bodyweight, play many kinds of sports, and so much more. Our spines may hurt at times because of our connection to our quadrupedal ancestors, and we may have traded specialization for general adaptability, but that adaptability gives us a range of habitats and a depth of experience unmatched by any other species on the planet, and that sense of motion over time gives us the ability to learn from the past and plan for the future. While I’m at it, thank you for our incredible diversity – there are humans that prefer hot climates to cold, and cold climates to hot, and high or low elevation, and urban or rural environments, and coast vs forest vs mountains vs desert – and there is virtually no place on earth we can’t live as a result. Our differences are precisely what makes our species so incredibly strong, adaptable, and flexible.

Thank you, evolution, for the varied spectrum of emotions I am able to feel, love, hate, anger, joy, sadness, happiness, for the neurotransmitters that encode pleasure and pain, for the incredible works of art and music and language that my species has been able to produce, for the ego that sits in my skull and observes and perceives and experiences all of these things. For the music and stories that are able to create subjective emotions in my consciousness, the emotions that ultimately make life worth living. For the feelings I get to experience when I am with a lover, feelings so intense and incredible that no words will ever be able to fully express them properly.

Thank you for this short, wonderful, difficult existence. I am grateful to be conscious at all, until such a time as my atoms disperse and re-join the rest of the universe. For (star)dust I am, and unto (star)dust I will return.

Or, as the old transformers movie from the 80s put it, “til all are one!”

this post inspired by Neil deGrasse Tyson’s cosmos and a fair amount of cannabis