Being alive
Alan Lightman, physicist and writer, wrote a profound piece, “The Ordinary Miracle of Existing,” in the July Atlantic. He opens with the perspective of the Age of Discovery in history. He reminds us the perspective as toddlers when “first begin using words such as me and mine around the age of 2, showing an awareness of themselves separate from there outside world.” He follows by launching into a deep perspective of our place in the vastness of the universe.
For his last perspective, which awakened me further, “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 the lottery with a hundred thousand billion different players.” All this from the procreation event from which we emerged!
“Being alive at all,” Lightman professes, “is the most extraordinary stroke of good luck that we will ever experience.” From here, Lightman articulates how we live day-to-day without recognizing our good fortune. To awaken us, he brings in Mary Oliver, who 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?”
Mary Oliver recently has come to me in bits and pieces. From her poem “Sometimes,” her “Instructions for living a life: pay attention, be astonished, and tell about it” has become a mantra I did not realize I carried. Now, Lightman and Oliver’s question that he quotes, I intend to be ever more in love with the life I have.
Were all of us to come to this place, think of the world we would be living in. Think of how we would be with one another. Were I to return to my first days of teaching and the forty years that followed invoking Lightman and Oliver’s wisdom, what kind of teacher would I have been? I don’t know the answer. Perhaps I was closer to Lightman and Oliver’s posits than I knew; I hope so. What more could I want for my students than to have them be awake to being alive as “the most extraordinary stroke of good luck that we will ever experience.” And to have them feel being alive with their “wild and precious life?”
In these troubled times, it’s a challenge to imagine the good fortune of our extraordinary lives. Teachers could do no better than inculcate these values, these understandings. Same for us as parents. If we choose to live under the umbrella of Lightman and Oliver’s wisdom, if we offer it to our children, we will be doing our part to be alive in harmony with the planet. Some say it may be too late, but we would be remiss if we did not try.
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forward” (Kierkegaard)
I write to bring ideas and methods from my life as a teacher in the latter half of the 20th century to help teachers and the public to “live forward” in this century. My latest book, Teacher in the Rye: Doing It My Way is available on Amazon. And I welcome comments here on my Blog or by email at frankthoms3@gmail.com.
