The Universe Is Conspiring to Help Us - Really

If you want cut yourself some slack, take a little time to read Kevin Kelly's Christmas essay on the This I Believe portion of the NPR site. Here's just one eloquently-put piece of it to whet the appetite.

We are at the receiving end of a huge gift simply by being alive. It does not matter how you calculate it, our time here is unearned. Maybe you figure your existence is the result of a billion unlikely accidents, and nothing more; then certainly your life is an unexpected and undeserved surprise. That's the definition of a gift. Or maybe you figure there's something bigger behind this small human reality; your life is then a gift from the greater to the lesser. As far as I can tell none of us have brought about our own existence, nor done much to earn such a remarkable experience. The pleasures of colors, cinnamon rolls, bubbles, touchdowns, whispers, long conversations, sand on your bare feet – these are all undeserved rewards.

[From NPR: The Universe Is Conspiring to Help Us]

Or as Monty Python puts it (not quite as graciously as Kelly) in The Galaxy Song:

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.