We place life’s bets by countless calculations of probability, conscious and unconscious, only to discover over and over how short they fall of the wildest reaches of the possible, which always includes but exceeds the probable. It helps to remember that we ourselves are children of improbability, that everything we treasure exists not because it had to, not because it was likely or necessary, but because the universe took a gamble against the staggering odds otherwise.
THE WILDEST BET IS THE WINNING BET
by Maria PopovaYou wouldn’t have bet on it,
the battered rock
orbiting a star
from the discount bin
of the universe,
wouldn’t have guessed
that it would bloom
mitochondria and music,
that it would mushroom
mountains and minds,and the hummingbird wing
whirring a hundred times faster
than your eye can blink,and your eye that took
five hundred million years
from trilobite to telescope,and the unhurried orange lichen
growing on the black boulder
two hundred times more slowly
than the tectonic plates beneath
are drifting apartand the marbled orca
carrying her dead calf
down the entire edge
of the continent,
carrying the weight
of consciousnessand consciousness
how it windows
this tenement
of breath and bone
with wonder,
how it hovers over everything,
gigantic and unnecessary,
like music,
like love.
My brightest gratitude to Nick Cave for the soulful reading and to Brazilian artist Daniel Bruson for the breathtaking animation, and to both of them for the ongoing collaboration that began with “But We Had Music.”
donating = loving
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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