Do not ever allow yourself
to reduce the incomprehensible miracle
of your very existence
to basic questions of self-worth.
Do not ever allow your boss to write you off
as nothing more than a worker
who is failing to meet
some arbitrary set of expectations.
Do not ever allow a bully to tell you
that you are nothing more than a child
lacking in physical strength.
Do not ever allow a politician
to boil your being
down to a cheap distillation
of inside jokes and snickering, racist
circumlocutions.
The fact that you are here,
today,
alive and present
and reading these words
is a stentorian, staggering miracle.
We are,
all of us,
perhaps guilty
of occasionally forgetting
this fundamental fact.
But we must remember,
you and I,
and every other being with us,
that we sprang forth from nothing—
absolute oblivion—
into awareness and consciousness
and individuality, and personality
in this gargantuan, freezing, largely empty universe.
Allow me to remind you
that that idea
is entirely incredible—
the purest void was somehow spun into
the totality of your being—
into the infinity of the present moment—
a Möbius-strip mindfuck
expanding outward in space and time
reaching toward all directions simultaneously.
The fact that you and I are here is miraculous.
And the fact that you exist is a miracle.
Do not ever let
our sickly civilization
try to tell you anything to the contrary.
