Our improbable existence: A love letter to life’s chaos, comedy, and quiet wonder!

Life is often perceived as a purposeful journey, a grand narrative. But when we pause and peer beneath that comforting story, a crazy truth stirs: our existence is rooted in staggering randomness. Each of us is a sentient blip—a brief, bewildered miracle—brought into being by a cascade of biological, historical, and cosmic coincidences that could have unfolded in infinite other ways.

It is this breathtaking improbability that makes life so wondrous—a chaos with a dash of glitter that we can’t help but marvel at.

The lottery, we didn’t buy a ticket for 

Life begins with a roll of the celestial dice. The where, when, and to whom of our birth—none of it chosen—springs from a sprawling lottery beyond our grasp. One spirited sperm. One chill egg. One breath. One moment of yes. Had that microsecond tilted slightly—had a single variable hiccupped—someone else would be here, sitting in our chair, eating our snacks, jotting to-do lists.

For us to come into being, our parents had to meet—perhaps through a serendipitous encounter. Every single ancestor, spanning thousands of years, had to survive long enough to pass on their genes. Had even one link in that chain snapped—had someone not crossed a street, not fled a famine or a war, not fallen in love—we would not be.

Our existence emerges from a chaotic tangle of biological happenstance, where countless variables had to align perfectly for our birth to occur. Our genetic blueprint, too, is built on chance. Traits like gender, intelligence, appearance, color, temperament, and health arrived with us like stardust in a suitcase. We didn’t ask for them, and they are non-returnable. Yet those traits shape the contours of how we live, love, struggle, and dream.

Beyond biology, the circumstances of our birth—nationality, mother tongue, social status, access to health services and education, safety net (or lack thereof)—are gifts or griefs handed to us by the blindfolded midwife of chance. A child born into wealth may grow up with a passport to the world. Another, born into poverty, may never glimpse beyond survival. We do not get to choose our starter kit. Yet these chancy beginnings shape our identities, beliefs, gods, values, and futures. All arbitrary outcomes in a world swirling with flux.

We didn’t earn our existence—we crash-landed into it. Our lives are not stories written with a purpose or a plot. Each one of us is an exquisite accident. A fluke. A cosmic joke. A wink at existence. A trembling note in a song no one planned. We are the biological equivalent of a typo that somehow made it past the editor because Mercury was in retrograde. Our landing here is a weird drama; it was likely conceived at 3 a.m. by a sleep-deprived intern named Chaos.

We could so easily not be. Yet here we are, scrolling through philosophical musings on a glowing rectangle while half-listening to Kishore Kumar on the loop.

The choreography of chance 

Randomness, a constant companion, pirouettes through every chapter of our lives, shaping everything that matters—our childhood friends, our job, our epic heartbreak, our marriage, our children, our dog.

A missed train. A misdialed number. A mistimed diagnosis. A stumble. These small, seemingly trivial moments often cast long shadows—pebbles tossed into the still water of our lives, their ripples unseen but unstoppable.

And yet, randomness doesn’t operate in a vacuum. It dances within a set of boundaries: societal structures, cultural norms, the law of the land, and inequities—forming invisible walls that restrict the direction of our lives. And, of course, those boundaries are random, too. A brilliant mind might be dimmed by poverty. A mediocre one might rise through privilege. Life unfolds as an uneasy duet between chaos and constraint. It’s as if life takes our best-laid plans, throws them in a blender, and whispers, “Trust the process.”

Sometimes, it works. Sometimes, it doesn’t. Some people get a gold-plated ladder; others are given a trampoline made of existential dread. Some rise despite the odds; others stumble in shadows. Some inherit keys; others face locked doors. For some, serendipity arrives wearing slippers that don’t even squeak; others are handed lemons.

“There but for fortune”

Phil Ochs nailed it in his 1963 protest song There But for Fortune. Each stanza paints a vignette: a prisoner, a vagrant, a drunk, a war-torn land. Each ends with the haunting refrain: “There but for fortune, may go you or I.” It’s an atheistic take on the biblical phrase “There but for the grace of God go I,” with the “grace of God” replaced by “fortune.”

The prisoner, the homeless person, the addict—they are us, just one lapse of judgment removed. One undercooked decision. One banana peel at midnight. One unpaid rent. One medical emergency. One war away.

What is fate, really, if not a string of tiny accidents wearing an overcoat?

Writers and thinkers across time have echoed this truth. Karl Marx thundered that the rich get richer while the rest of us recycle soup. Predating Marx, Urdu poet Mir Taqi Mir had whispered:
 Amīr-zādon se Dillī ke mil na tā-maqdūr;
  ki ham faqīr hue hain inhīñ kī daulat se.
 (Don’t mingle with Delhi’s rich—our poverty was born from their wealth.)

Oscar Wilde saw it too in the eyes of a fellow prisoner. In The Ballad of Reading Gaol, he reminds us that we all carry the seeds of ruin and redemption. We’re not fundamentally different. Just differently tossed by the winds of fortune.

These voices of wisdom call us to humility. To compassion. To softer judgments and a deepening recognition of how arbitrary life can be. All told, we’re all one chaotic impulse away from becoming a cautionary tale.

No wonder that human birth is considered extremely rare and precious in the eastern traditions. We are impossibilities with pulse. Simply being here is a miracle. So, how do we respond to this unscripted life? We awaken. We say yes to life. We greet the randomness not with despair but with reverence.

The blind turtle and the cattle yoke

The randomness of existence can sometimes leave us reeling. If we are born by accident, live by chance, and vanish without a trace, can life hold meaning at all? The realization that each of us is a fleeting arrangement of matter and consciousness in the vast expanse of time and space can evoke existential unease and lead to feelings of insignificance.

A Buddhist parable offers perspective. A blind turtle lives at the ocean’s bottom. Once every hundred years, it surfaces for air. Drifting somewhere on the ocean’s surface is a wooden cattle yoke. The odds of the turtle surfacing and slipping its head through the yoke’s hole? Astronomically low.

After 100 years, the locations of the turtle and the yoke are immeasurably randomized due to their movement across the vast ocean. The mind boggles when we consider the probability of the blind turtle popping its head through the yoke’s hole during its centennial visit. It’s nothing short of statistical mayhem. And yet, those odds are still better than the odds of our being born human. It is no wonder that human birth is considered extremely rare and precious in the Buddhist tradition. We are impossibilities with pulse. Simply being here is a miracle.

So, how do we respond to this unscripted life? We awaken. We say yes to life. We greet the randomness not with despair but with reverence.

We are each an unlikely guest at the feast of existence. And that knowledge invites us to cherish each moment. To cultivate love, curiosity, and courage. To soften our grip on control, and to hold wonder like a fragile flame.

A cosmic accident worth toasting

A life without a preset purpose is one of pure spontaneity. An empty canvas. It’s ours to freestyle. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure sport. It doesn’t need a road map to be magnificent. The universe is improv theatre with no rehearsals and no cues. When nothing is promised, everything is possible. Purpose is overrated. Pasta is not.

That we are here, now—with this breath, this flickering awareness, able to laugh, cry, build, dance, jump, mess up, and try again—is an improbable gift, lending a kind of sacredness to life.

We’re not here to be perfect. We’re here to be real—soft, silly, and stunned by beauty. We start a joke at our school reunion, but forget the punchline, embarrassing ourselves! We remember the punchline on our way back home. We smile softly. What beauty that smile is!

Alive and radiant, we carry a consciousness that can marvel at a sunset, weep over a story, hold a child, forgive an enemy, and sometimes—at 1:43 a.m.—crave chips and question everything. When the universe does not answer, we smile softly. What beauty that smile is!

Art, music, storytelling—these are our rituals of wonder. We create meaning out of randomness through doodles, daydreams, and poems that don’t rhyme. We build things—songs, babies, sculptures, half-burnt pancakes. None of it lasts. But it happened. And that’s holy.

Let’s raise a glass to our glorious one-in-a-quadrillion shot at being a messy miracle on this weird little rock spinning through space. Let’s greet this improbable life with ever-deepening awe.

Let’s be true to the glorious oddity that each one of us is. Let’s be all soul, all sass. Let’s love fiercely, hold wonder close. Fail loudly, grin like we invented it. High-five the moon, sing off-key to the sky. Tip generously, especially when the waiter calls us uncle. Be kind—not because it’s noble, but because what else do we do with all this miraculous humanness?

In the end, aren’t we the blind turtle that slipped through the yoke? The typo the universe forgot to fix? Shouldn’t that make us happy as a lark?

We are each a brief spark in a vast, timeless universe. And for a while, we burn. This is the only truth that matters. We are here. This is the wonder.We don’t need a reason to be here. Being here is reason enough. This is the whole point.