It is a miracle that there exists anything instead of nothing at all in a universe that tends towards chaos and entropy. It is a highly laborious long-term unlikely fluke that made life instead of non-existence and it is a miracle of an even greater order that the complex systems the multicellular organisms are have developed consciousness and created complex systems of their own – that are actually stable here and there. Just imagine the infinite number of variables that have to be just right for a complex system governed by a complex system to work for any amount of time.

The universe was born as pure energy, pure potential, pure nothing that had a tendency to just spread. The differences were miniscule; the temperature differential needed for some areas to become spontaneously denser is a thousandth of a degree. Were it to stay completely homogenous there would have most certainly been nothing at all for eternity. But clumping occurred and the clumps fused with their nearby clump  neighbours, all happening by the two fundamental laws in a time when some of the laws of physics weren’t even present because there was no physical mater to govern yet. The two laws are necessity and chance and they encompass all things large and small. But in a universe lorded over by chance, there was still no necessity of existence. The clumped together clumps got denser by each clumping and finally reached a critical mass in which they ignited and formed stars, burning with being “alive” for the first time (that we know of). The first necessities arose, and one of them was that all that was alive had to die at one point, so did the stars. Supernovae detonated all around, hugged by the vast emptiness, and produced unimaginable energy that fused together the simpler atoms and formed more diversity in the periodic table. More diversity means more factors at play and a greater chance at randomness and necessity alike. Most random things fail and are unsustainable, but some survived and eons later now live within you. Each element of you was made in the belly of dying star, as Carl Sagan so poetically said “We are all star stuff”. We’re the product of chance encounter and arrangement of something not alive or conscious, the debris of flaming giants that rose to the point where they are able to question things and try to reach to the beginning of time, the line dividing the “nothing” and “something” to know our origin.

No matter what happens in the day to day life, no matter if you are in a good place or are struggling with something right now – you’ve already made it here, you’re a veteran of a hard battle between the ultimate tendency of all things towards entropic dissipation. You’re ALIVE and have the chance not to just exist as inert matter but actually LIVE, experience and learn in real time. You’ve already got the greatest gift that can be given. Nothing is eternal, not even the universe. All that begins will end, but you have no control over things that happen beyond the points of beginnings and ends of your story while all of the rest in the middle is yours to experience. The sheer ratio of nothing and something in what we recognize as observable space is staggering. Respect all things, all beings – the path that had to unfold for them to be here for a while, as the pool of non-randomness, was astronomically improbable. Yet, we’re all here and have beaten the odds, still fighting to go on. Universe is entropy; life is a temporary strong fort against it. And so the most amazing battle that has ever been continues on. Religious connotations of any denomination aside, what a noble purpose it is to recognize and treat all life as sacred. It is.