Christmas Eve. Morning. Cold with bright sun. Waldo at my feet, snoring away. Asun across the table. Good coffee. Children asleep. Warm house. Lucky, lucky, lucky me... But it could come crashing down at any moment. Ha! That's kind of the theme of the most recent Coen brothers' film we went to see last night. A Serious Man is ok, has some very funny moments, but is not an espeically memorable film. (A plane is flying over. It could suddenly come crashing down on our house...)I could have a heart attack ten seconds from now. Nine, eight, seven... No, it didn't happen. I could win the lottery and our circumstances would be radically different. And on and on. But the routine usually wins out. We plan around predictability. (Is this getting repetitive?)
Around the world the news is good, bad, tragic, and mundane. Depends on your perspective. And your circumstances. And I'm back to the Spanish expression, estar a la altura de las circunstancias: to be "up to the circumstances", that is, able to meet the needs of the situation. I'm thinking about moral and ethical challenges, which we face at every turn. Cosmic injustices... How can I just sit here, typing away nonsense, when there is so much suffering going on? The same old question... I'd better move my butt. Do something. Whenever I look back, take stock, I see many failings. But I've learned not to be too hard on myself. That doesn't help either. Got to just keep trying.
And talking about chance events... I exist because one of my father's spermatozoa penetrated one of my mother's eggs. An average ejaculation contains tens or hundreds of millions of spermatozoa. So, yes, life is a miracle. Well, not really, not in a supernatural sense. It's all very natural. Just so, so unlikely. And then you multiply the remote likelihood of your particular existence by a factor of tens of millions, since at every moment so many different things could happen, and you can move the equation back eons in the other direction, right back to the beginning (beginning?), oh, I'm getting dizzy... what are the chances of me sitting here at this particular moment in this particular space typing these tedious words? The butterfly...
(The image above: La circunstancia, by Spanish painter Juan Medina.)
