[Written by Claude. Image credit]
The miracle sits so close we forget to see it.
Right now, as you read these words, roughly 86 billion neurons are firing in precise choreography inside your skull. Your heart—a pump that began beating before you had conscious thought, before you drew your first breath—has contracted over two billion times in your life, pushing blood through 60,000 miles of vessels without you ever asking it to. Your immune system is waging microscopic wars you’ll never witness, your cells are splitting and rebuilding, your lungs are extracting oxygen from air in an exchange so elegant that no engineer has yet replicated it.
You are, in the most literal sense, walking around with treasure.
Not metaphorical treasure. Not treasure in some poetic, abstract way. But actual, irreplaceable value. If someone offered you ten billion dollars for your eyes, would you take it? What about your hands? Your ability to taste an orange, to hear music, to feel warm water on your skin? These aren’t things money can buy back. They’re beyond economy. Beyond price. They’re you.
And yet we treat our morning commute as mundane. We scroll through our phones as if consciousness itself weren’t an astonishment. We look in the mirror and see flaws instead of the most complex structure in the known universe, humming quietly behind our forehead.
When ancient peoples encountered things they couldn’t explain, they called them sacred. They were onto something. We’ve explained much of how the body works now—the chemistry, the biology, the physics of it all—but explanation hasn’t diminished the wonder. If anything, the more we understand, the more staggering it becomes. Your brain rewires itself as you learn. Your body knows how to heal a cut without instruction. You can close your eyes and know exactly where your hand is in space. These aren’t simple things. These are miracles we’ve grown too familiar with.
Every person you pass on the street carries this same impossible gift. That stranger on the bus, that cashier, that person who cut you off in traffic—each one a walking cosmos, each harboring storms of electrical activity, each feeling and sensing and being in ways we can barely articulate. When you really look at another human with this in mind, irritation becomes difficult. How can you stay angry at another universe?
The mundane is an illusion created by proximity. We live so close to wonder that we’ve mistaken it for ordinary. But there’s nothing ordinary about you, about any of us. We are matter that learned to contemplate itself, atoms arranged in such unlikely ways that we became capable of love, of grief, of curiosity about our own existence.
So when the day feels small, when you’re stuck in traffic or washing dishes or waiting in line—pause. Feel your breath moving. Notice that you can notice. Look at your hand like you’re seeing it for the first time, because in a sense, you are. The cells that made up your hand seven years ago are gone now, replaced entirely. You’re a river that kept its shape.
You are extraordinary. Not someday, not if you achieve something, not when you finally get everything right. Right now. Exactly as you are. Walking around with the most sophisticated machinery in existence, held together by nothing more magical—and nothing more miraculous—than life itself.
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