Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Taking myself less seriously

Author:Susan Kitchens
Posted:9/11/2000; 7:28:32 PM
Topic:fork
Msg #:21217 (In response to 21197)
Prev/Next:21216 / 21218

Considering the odds each of us overcomes at the moment of conception, 
all other experiences that follow pale in comparison.

That's a stunning thought. I must remember that. Somehow that escaped me in biology class.

Funny.... I thought about this a whole lot while growing up. I didn't get diddley about that in biology class, but I do remember a camping trip where I laid on my stomach and gently smoothed out the sand with my forearms while overhearing my mother and her friend discussing the awesome statistical probability of conception and existence. The whole conversation flowed around me while I patted the sand down, all those tiny tiny specks of tiny tiny rock.

For some reason, I was overwhelmed with the other set of odds, the ones that were set against me, and considered it from the other perspective: what if those odds prevailed? For a long time after that, I obsessed with annihilation, of what it would be like if I did not exist, if this fertilized egg were to be miscarried, if a different sperm succeeded in fertilizing that egg, or if my folks didn't do the nasty in time for *anything* to happen to "my" egg. Now, why I brooded over UnExisting instead of exulting in the miracle of Existance has more to do with some conditions of life as I found it (which is maybe barely hinted at in another post I made in this thread), but that's how it was as I lay there, staring dreamily at all those sand crystals and thinking about statistics.

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