On the northwestern shore of Africa, some 150 miles south of the Canary Islands, the coastline slightly bulges in a pimple known as Cape Bojador. For Europeans in the early 15th century, Cape Bojador marked the boundary between the known and the unknown. North of the cape was civilization and the cities of light. South were the mystical lands of Africa and the Mare Tenebrosum, the “Sea of Darkness.” Ancient notions, dating back to Ptolemy, claimed that Africa was surrounded by boiling seas filled with giant creatures, whirlpools, and perpetual darkness. No sailor had ventured south of Cape Bojador and returned.
The challenge was taken up by Prince Henry of Portugal. Between 1424 and 1434, he sent 14 ship expeditions to round the perilous cape. None succeeded. All turned back from fear or foul weather. Yet the unknown beckoned.
Undeterred, Henry dispatched the explorer Gils Eannes for a 15th attempt. This time, Henry’s man succeeded in rounding the cape, giving it a wide berth and steering far to the west. As he turned south, Eannes looked back over his shoulder and was astonished to realize that he had left the dreaded cape behind. On his next trip, the explorer landed in a bay many miles to the south. There, he saw footprints of humans, camels…
Prince Henry the Navigator was a pioneer in what historians have called the Age of Discovery. His triumph allowed improved mapmaking, new understanding of coastlines and ocean currents, and the opening of new trade routes. Most important, Prince Henry enlarged our perspective. He enlarged our concept of the world—not only of geography but also of our place in new lands and seas, our possibilities. Indeed, one can view all of human history (our art, our science, our exploration, our invention) as a gradual increase in perspective, of ourselves and of the world.
Perspective begins at a young age. Toddlers first begin using words such as me and mine around the age of 2, showing an awareness of themselves as separate from the outside world. Shortly thereafter, conscious exploration and discovery begins: Parents and caretakers at first, then the nursery, then the house, then the neighborhood. Little by little, we humans gain an understanding of what the world contains. We socialize, we read, we travel, we experience. But, in hindsight, our perspective remains highly limited. A significant minority of Americans—more than 20 percent—have never traveled abroad. More than half of us live in the same state where we were born.
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Over the span of less than a century, discoveries in astronomy and biology have expanded our perspective almost beyond comprehension, if not as individuals, then at least as a human civilization. We have learned that our solar system sits on the outskirts of an enormous galaxy of a hundred billion stars called the Milky Way. And the size of our galaxy is practically inconceivable. It takes a light ray, which travels at a speed of 186,000 miles a second, 100,000 years to cross from one end of the Milky Way to the other. Other galaxies—many other galaxies—exist too. The mind reels from trying to imagine such expanse. Think of an ant in New York City contemplating a trip to San Francisco. Our houses, our roads and bridges, our cities are a speck in the cosmos, a dust mote, one grain of sand on a vast beach.
We have also enlarged our concept of time in the cosmos. We have learned that the universe began about 14 billion years ago. That’s about one hundred million human lifetimes ago. Just as our entire planet is a speck in the cosmos, our individual lives are fleeting moments in the grand unfolding of time. And, as the Buddhists always emphasize, everything is impermanent. Everything passes away. The ancient cities of Sumeria and Egypt are long gone, as are the temples of ancient Greece and Rome. Tenochtilan, the capital of the Aztec Empire; Port Royal of Jamaica; The English coastal village of Dunwich. All gone. All that we see around us today will one day be gone. Against this backdrop of history, on Earth and in the cosmos, our individual lives are brief flickers in the chasms of time.
It is hard to imagine such a cavernous theater we find ourselves in. But it is even more difficult to fathom how unique each of us is, how improbable, how lucky to be alive at all. Advances in biology have shown that the instructions for creating each individual human being are encoded in a set of molecules called DNA. Far more possible arrangements of human DNA exist than there are atoms in the observable universe—each arrangement corresponding to a different human being. One of those many possible arrangements is each of us.
Or consider the process of conception, when a single egg unites with a single sperm. Each human female has about 300,000 eggs during the fertile period of her life. Each male ejaculation has about 300 million sperm. Thus each conception contains about a hundred thousand billion different possible combinations of DNA. In other words, there are a hundred thousand billion unique and different human beings that could result from each procreation event. Only one of those possible combinations led to each of you reading this article at this moment. Here’s a way to visualize that extremely tiny fraction. If you took a very long ruler that stretched from here to the planet Pluto, one inch of that distance would be you. The rest of the distance would be other possible human beings that could have been, but never were. Each of us has won a lottery with a hundred thousand billion different players.
Being alive at all is the most extraordinary stroke of good luck we will ever experience. Yet it is the easiest to overlook, to take for granted. We wake up in the morning, have our coffee, make breakfast, send the kids off to school, go to our jobs, move through our routines, worry about deadlines, check off items on our to-do list. And we forget that beneath all of it lies something profoundly rare: existence itself. The simple fact that we are here, conscious and aware, is so unlikely that it borders on the miraculous. Because we experience that miracle every day, we treat it as ordinary, even guaranteed, mostly unnoticed at all. We postpone joy, assuming there will always be more time. We don’t see the beauty in small moments. We simply go about the business of life, without taking a second to notice life itself. In making this comment, I am aware that in the time-driven, frantic pace of our world today, many people do not have the luxury of pausing to take stock of such moments.
There is a little more to the story. There will never be another you in the future of the universe. (Some apologies are due to Buddhists and Hindus, who believe in rebirth, but even the reborn individual is not the same.) From the distant past, billions of years ago, to the distant future, billions of years ahead, the universe will never see another one of you.
It is almost impossible to wrap our heads around such things. We could not have had this grand perspective as recently as a century ago. And we have found it not through Prince Henry’s ships but through our laboratories, our telescopes, and our minds. So the question is: What are we to make of the fantastically improbable fact of our existence, our moment of life? Or, as Mary Oliver asks in the last lines of her poem “The Summer Day”: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
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I can speak only for myself. First of all, gratitude ought to replace entitlement. Gratitude not only for my great good fortune in a long chain of accidents, but gratitude to the individual human beings who have helped me along the way. Some years ago, I went to a Buddhist meditation retreat and learned about the concept of the “retinue,” a constellation of mentors that one imagines hovering nearby. Attempting to put this beautiful idea into practice, I collected the photographs of a couple dozen people who have guided me in my life—parents, high-school teachers, college teachers, music teachers, rabbis, colleagues. Some had already passed away. I made a poster of the images and hung it above my desk. Each day, I look up at the poster and give gratitude. It seems like a simple thing, but the gesture helps me position myself in the world, helps me slow down and take a moment to acknowledge my good fortune as the recipient of caring attention and the good fortune of simply being alive.
Two millennia ago, the Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius understood the fragility of life when he wrote in his Meditations: “Whatever you do, whatever you project, so do and so project as one who may at this very moment depart out of this life.” With my one brief moment, I can try to make the world a slightly better place. Gratitude without action is empty. The mentors hovering above my desk all gave me something. Although I cannot return the favor to each of them individually, I can return it to the world. I can attempt to pass on the kindness and good faith and caring.
There is an irony here. As each of us dwindles in size by comparison to the cosmic stretches of space and of time, our individual lives, our improbable existence becomes more and more important. With the understanding of my great good fortune, I also feel a sense of responsibility. But to whom, or to what, am I responsible? Not the universe, which is without mind. And not the huge number of human beings that could have been but never were. I can hardly be responsible to people that do not exist. I believe it is a responsibility to myself—to not waste my precious life. In the immense hallways of time and of space, out of the fantastic number of potential lives and the infinite chain of accidents that led to this moment, I am here. I breathe. I see. I feel. I experience this grand spectacle of a cosmos I find myself in. That is not a thing to be wasted, or left unobserved.
Early in the 20th century, the Alsatian philosopher and polymath Albert Schweitzer introduced a concept he called Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben, which translates to “Reverence for Life.” According to Schweitzer’s autobiography, one day in 1915, while travelling on a river in Africa, the 40-year-old witnessed, all at once, the sun shimmering on the water, the background of tropical forest, and a herd of hippopotamuses basking on the banks of the river. Suddenly, he felt “the reverence for life.” Later, Schweitzer put it this way: “I am life that wills to live in the midst of other life that wills to live.”
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