Excerpt from 'This is How' by Augusten Burroughs
Miracles do happen.
You must believe this. No matter what else you believe about life, you must believe in miracles.
Because we all are, every one of us, living on a round rock that spins around and around at almost a quarter of a million miles per hour in an unthinkably vast blackness called space.
There is nothing else like us for as far as our telescopic eyes can see.
In a universe filled with spinning, barren rocks, frozen gas, ice, dust, and radiation, we live on a planet filled with soft, green leaves and salty oceans and honey made from bees, which themselves live within geometrically complex and perfect structures of their own architecture and creation.
In our trees are birds whose songs are as complex and nuanced as Beethoven’s greatest sonatas.
And despite the wild, endless spinning of our planet and its never-ending orbit around the sun--itself a star on fire--when we pour water into a glass, the water stays in the glass.
All of these are miracles.
The gum stuck to the bottom of your shoe is a miracle of stratospheric proportions: that there is such a thing as gum, such at thing as a shoe, such a thing as a human being.
I mean, what are the odds?
Think of the actual physical elements that compose our bodies: we are 98 percent hydrogen and oxygen and carbon.
That’s table sugar.
You are made of the same stuff as table sugar.
Just a couple of tiny differences here and there and look what happened to the sugar: it can stand upright and send tweets.
Because the sun seems yellow and friendly and we only notice the air when it stinks and we take all of this existing business entirely for granted, it’s easy to forget or not even consider in the first place, not even once, the fact that we exist, that we are a we at all, is the very definition of a miracle.
Miracle: an effect or extraordinary event in the physical world that surpasses all known human or natural powers and is ascribed to a supernatural cause.
It is simply a miracle that you woke up this morning.
And it is a miracle that, in billions of miles filled with blackness and rocks, you were born.
And if, against the odds of solar winds and burning stars and emptiness that extends for lifetimes, any single person could defy explanation and have the audacity to be born, then surely there must be at least one half of a tiny, tiny chance that the disease that is scheduled to kill your child will go entirely missing by morning.
While this may be so unlikely as to essentially be not within the realm of possibility, it is within the realm of possibility, but just.
“Daddy, am I dying?”
“Mom? Am I gonna die?”
“Yes, my love, the single immovable fact of your life, the only thing anybody--me or all the doctors in the world or anybody who is an expert in anything and everything--the only known certainty about your life is that it will end. Yes, my love, you are dying. And so am I. And so is the doctor. Life is a process of dying.”
“Yeah, but does the doctor say I’m dying now?”
“The doctor says you are.”
“So, am I?”
“Well, you know when you look up at the sky at night and you see stars? And you know how if you keep looking without blinking you see more stars? And how if you keep looking even longer you see that the black sky is really made almost entirely out of stars that seem to extend back and back and back forever? The chance that you will live is about the size of just one small star our of every star you see.”
“So, not very much of a chance?”
“Not very much of a chance, no.”
“But maybe a little chance?”
“Maybe. A very little, tiny, tiny chance.”
“Okay.”
--Augusten Burroughs
This is How
You must believe this. No matter what else you believe about life, you must believe in miracles.
Because we all are, every one of us, living on a round rock that spins around and around at almost a quarter of a million miles per hour in an unthinkably vast blackness called space.
There is nothing else like us for as far as our telescopic eyes can see.
In a universe filled with spinning, barren rocks, frozen gas, ice, dust, and radiation, we live on a planet filled with soft, green leaves and salty oceans and honey made from bees, which themselves live within geometrically complex and perfect structures of their own architecture and creation.
In our trees are birds whose songs are as complex and nuanced as Beethoven’s greatest sonatas.
And despite the wild, endless spinning of our planet and its never-ending orbit around the sun--itself a star on fire--when we pour water into a glass, the water stays in the glass.
All of these are miracles.
The gum stuck to the bottom of your shoe is a miracle of stratospheric proportions: that there is such a thing as gum, such at thing as a shoe, such a thing as a human being.
I mean, what are the odds?
Think of the actual physical elements that compose our bodies: we are 98 percent hydrogen and oxygen and carbon.
That’s table sugar.
You are made of the same stuff as table sugar.
Just a couple of tiny differences here and there and look what happened to the sugar: it can stand upright and send tweets.
Because the sun seems yellow and friendly and we only notice the air when it stinks and we take all of this existing business entirely for granted, it’s easy to forget or not even consider in the first place, not even once, the fact that we exist, that we are a we at all, is the very definition of a miracle.
Miracle: an effect or extraordinary event in the physical world that surpasses all known human or natural powers and is ascribed to a supernatural cause.
It is simply a miracle that you woke up this morning.
And it is a miracle that, in billions of miles filled with blackness and rocks, you were born.
And if, against the odds of solar winds and burning stars and emptiness that extends for lifetimes, any single person could defy explanation and have the audacity to be born, then surely there must be at least one half of a tiny, tiny chance that the disease that is scheduled to kill your child will go entirely missing by morning.
While this may be so unlikely as to essentially be not within the realm of possibility, it is within the realm of possibility, but just.
“Daddy, am I dying?”
“Mom? Am I gonna die?”
“Yes, my love, the single immovable fact of your life, the only thing anybody--me or all the doctors in the world or anybody who is an expert in anything and everything--the only known certainty about your life is that it will end. Yes, my love, you are dying. And so am I. And so is the doctor. Life is a process of dying.”
“Yeah, but does the doctor say I’m dying now?”
“The doctor says you are.”
“So, am I?”
“Well, you know when you look up at the sky at night and you see stars? And you know how if you keep looking without blinking you see more stars? And how if you keep looking even longer you see that the black sky is really made almost entirely out of stars that seem to extend back and back and back forever? The chance that you will live is about the size of just one small star our of every star you see.”
“So, not very much of a chance?”
“Not very much of a chance, no.”
“But maybe a little chance?”
“Maybe. A very little, tiny, tiny chance.”
“Okay.”
--Augusten Burroughs
This is How