There are only two ways to live. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
– Albert Einstein
I was very religious when I was young. I was also very afraid. Fear didn’t paralyze my proclivity for action but it did keep me in a vice grip for a long time.
Every night as a child I listed everyone I knew, asking god to keep them all safe. If I missed a name or spoke out of order I would begin again, lest my mistakes caused a terrible tragedy. Sometimes praying took several hours.
I believed that life was the experience of an endless fugue of problems to be solved. I believed in a god but didn’t have any trust that things would be okay.
Through the atheism of my twenties and the whateverism of the decade after that, I did feel something profound when experiencing nature and studying genetics and biology. There was something about life that seemed amazing and powerful. I felt it when hiking in Alaska and traveling broke through Europe. But I didn’t think about it much beyond that. It certainly didn’t have anything to do with my daily life.
The past few years have brought more loss than the past three decades. Many of the people I prayed for as a child are gone. Two new lives have grown in my belly and now run through my everyday life. There have been cancer scares, cancer, baby surgeries, husband surgeries, debilitating depression, a stroke, Alzheimers, financial instability.
I’ve always been resilient, an accomplished problem solver, pretty adept at optimizing the effort of dealing with life. But what I see now is that life is actually a constant, an infinite safety net, an endless fugue of commonplace miracles. There’s nothing to deal with.
There is loss, and there also is my heart doing what a heart does without any problem solving needed, oak trees growing from acorns, ants doing whatever the hell it is they do in the month before they invade my house every year, black holes black hole-ing, the universe expanding and contracting.
These days I know everything will be okay, because that’s just the nature of this weird and beautiful human experience of life, which will happen whether I’m trying to solve it or not.