What Are You Without?

Ask yourself each question slowly.

Do “you” make sense without the breath in your lungs? Without the trees and the algae that made the oxygen in that breath? Without the food you ate this week— the soil that grew it, the rain that fell on the soil? Without the trillions of microbes in your guts digesting that food, so many that half the cells you call your body aren't even human? Without your ancestors? All of them surviving to reproduce? Four billion years of that to get the genes vibrating in every one of “your” cells? And who would you be without all the people that loved you? And that you loved? And without the language you're reading this in — the people who taught you words, who came up with those words? Who discovered fire? The billions of people that influenced the culture and worldviews that underwrite all your sensemaking. Who gave you the very ability to ask these questions? The people and cultures and contexts that nurtured the language that you know. And then who are you without gravity? Without the sun? Without the moon that holds Earth's tilt just right for seasons and is just far enough away for right sized tides? And who are you without the stars that blew up between 10-8 billion years ago whose explosions made the calcium in your bones, the iron in your blood, and the carbon in every cell of your body? Who are you without this thin film of life on the surface of this small blue green jewel of a planet?

“You” don’t make sense without all the rest of it.