Lucky and grateful

We're wrapping the semester this week. Lucky us.

The last section of Andrew Copson's Little Book of Humanism: Universal lessons on finding purpose, meaning, and joy includes the Dawkins line I included in my recent eulogy and that should be in every eulogy, humanist or not: we are "the lucky ones"...

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?” Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder

The "anaesthetic of familiarity" is the sedative we must wake from, Dawkins observes. "Isn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born?" 

Margaret Renkl expressed the same attitude in her Times essay yesterday, Sadness and Loss Are Everywhere. Books Can Help.

"We've all had near misses that shook us to the core: when a hydroplaning car skidded to a stop in the nick of time; when a toddler, unwatched for half a second, teetered at the top of a flight of steps but was caught just before stepping over the edge; when the scan showed a shadow that had to be a tumor but turned out to be nothing at all."

"And every near miss is almost always followed by a golden time, too brief, when the futile frustrations and pointless irritations of daily life fall away, when all that's left behind is gratitude. We are here. Our beloveds are here. How remarkable it is to be together. How full of grace the fallen world can be."

Gratitude is the best antidote for sadness and loss, and our most reliable source of resilience. We're lucky to have evolved a capacity for it, but it's hard to hold. The stoic emperor was right, and so is Ms. Renkl, we really have to be reminded every day. We should be especially grateful for the authors, living and gone, who remind us.