One In 400,000,000,000.

There’s this TED Talk by Mel Robbins, she speaks on taking charge of our lives, about why we postpone our best ideas, and the things we want to do.

It’s a brilliant talk, but there’s one segment in there that really stuck with me.

And that’s the title of this post.

That’s the probability of you, existing in this time period, the way you are now with all of us.

That’s an insanely high improbability, and yet we’re all still here.

We’re a very improbable species. And I like to remind myself of that fact whenever I feel overwhelmed with the problems I face, that in the end… my existence in and of itself is improbable beyond belief.

Everything else is minimal in comparison. Success has a higher chance of likelihood than of me existing, and yet I’m here. An impossible thing occurred. And it keeps occurring with each of us.

Here’s John Greene, from The Anthropocene Reviewed.

We are never far from wonders. I remember when my son was about two, we were walking in the woods one November morning. We were along a ridge, looking down at a forest in the valley below, where a cold haze seemed to hug the forest floor. I kept trying to get my oblivious two-year-old to appreciate the landscape. At one point, I picked him up and pointed out toward the horizon and said, “Look at that, Henry, just look at it!” And he said, “Weaf!” I said, “What?” And again he said, “Weaf,” and then reached out and grabbed a single brown oak leaf from the little tree next to us. I wanted to explain to him that you can see a brown oak leaf anywhere in the eastern United States in November, that nothing in the forest was less interesting. But after watching him look at it, I began to look as well, and I soon realized it wasn’t just a brown leaf. Its veins spidered out red and orange and yellow in a pattern too complex for my brain to synthesize, and the more I looked at that leaf with Henry, the more I was compelled into an aesthetic contemplation I neither understood nor desired, face-to-face with something commensurate to my capacity for wonder.

Wonder comes from within, the world around us is filled with more complexity than we can ever truly understand. We just need to look around more.

In the massive scale of the universe, where the cosmic forces that formed and shaped the planets into what they are now, and formed and shaped us into what we are now… Our improbability of existence is a beautiful mathematical fact that keeps me grounded when times are tough or when things go wrong.

Because no matter how wrong things can go… I’m still here. And that means that the probability of anything happening cannot go higher from here. The most impossible thing already happened… We’re already here.