Mortality
If you’re ever considering your own mortality, or the mortality of your loved ones – and we’re all forced to do so from time to time – this might help. I found it recently in a book by (of all people) Bill Bryson. I think it’s wonderful.
Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favoured evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely – make that miraculously – fortunate in your person ancestry. Consider that fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth’s mountains and rivers and oceans – every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stuck fast, untimely wounded or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result – eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly – in you.
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September 19th, 2009 at 4:06 pm
This is one of the coolest quotes ever. I stole it and put it up on my facebook page….