We are a miracle. To be is a miracle.

As I was warming down from my run earlier this evening, I looked up at the clear night-sky. Though the streetlights shone with their insipid incandescence I could still see the stars so alight. In less than a moment's turn I found myself becoming pensive, as I am apt to do frequently. Gazing at all the blackness and realising the near-absolute emptiness of the universe an incising terror soon gripped me. I contemplated and tussled with the thought of how small we and our little blue jewel of a planet are in the grand macrocosm. And I: a speck in the lightless void; an atom that fizzles for not even the briefest of moments; an insignificance amongst my eternal family of far-flung billion-year suns.

In the face of all this I felt that hope could not avail me. How could hope stand against this utter despair? I thought that perhaps this is why we as a species have created gods: to attach ourselves to something that is, in more than one way, indestructible when pitted against the unbearable pointlessness of existence.

But I am not satisfied with this; I will not be defeated by the Void! I stared back at the night-sky, both defiant and welcoming. I exist within its emptiness, and accept it. And, in fact, this emptiness is not empty at all. There is so much life and so much wonder and awe in everything. Go to the distant ends of the universe, the beginning of time; and come back to the present, to where you are, where this planet careers through space. Tell me that this is not an "inexpressible"—an inexpressible for there is no true word for it.

And why am I so unyielding? Life may just be an accident, but what an accident it is! We are a miracle. To be is a miracle. But I need not ascribe this to some unreachable, unknowable divine agent. Everything around us is divine. The great, endless cosmos is a great, unfathomable architecture, and it is its own architect. I can take comfort that my insignificance is an insignificance that forms an integral part of a divinity that is not divine, that is right in front my open and ever-wondrous eyes.

My being may only exist for a fraction of a fraction of the minutest time—but I exist nonetheless! And whilst in this current form (for existence is indeed relative) I shall continue to exist. Why waste this moment that I have on despair and hopelessness? I exist and I am and the entirety of my universe, the universe of everyone and everything around me, is mine; mine to make the most of. It is mine, and it is yours.

M.M.