About a decade ago I stumbled upon The Accidental Universe by MIT physicist and writer Alan Lightman. I devoured it in a weekend, and I return to it every few years.
So when the Instagram algorithm served me his latest piece in the Atlantic, I stopped mid-scroll, opened the article in my browser, and bookmarked it. I'm grateful I did.
Lightman ran the math on conception, and it broke my brain:
"Consider the process of conception, when a single egg unites with a single sperm. Each human female has about 300,000 eggs during the fertile period of her life. Each male ejaculation has about 300 million sperm. Thus each conception contains about a hundred thousand billion different possible combinations of DNA. In other words, there are a hundred thousand billion unique and different human beings that could result from each procreation event. Only one of those possible combinations led to each of you reading this article at this moment. Here's a way to visualize that extremely tiny fraction. If you took a very long ruler that stretched from here to the planet Pluto, one inch of that distance would be you. The rest of the distance would be other possible human beings that could have been, but never were. Each of us has won a lottery with a hundred thousand billion different players."
The quote speaks for itself, so I'll only add this: I sometimes lose sight of how extraordinary it is to be alive. You, me, and all of it, are a miracle.