Little me

I am the sum of things I did not choose. I am the melding of a random egg and a random sperm. Twenty-three random pairs of chromosomes determine much of how I look and who I am. My genes are then influenced by the outside world in ways I do not understand.

I am mostly bacteria, a factory for independent living beings that wander around my body, keeping me alive and perhaps killing me when they so wish.

I am the sum of my experiences – experiences on a random path appearing before me. I did not choose my year of birth nor in which part of the world I would arrive. I had little say in where I grew up, the schools I went to, the people I happened to meet, the job applications that happened to be successful, the religion my parents happened to be.

I am transient. I am a jumble of paradoxes that I do not understand. I am a different me with you and a different me with others. I haphazardly remember and forget things and my disposition sways with the wind.

I am part of systems. I am locked into an eternal cycle with nature. I am a small part of the superorganism of humanotechnology that we are creating together.

I am one person of eight billion. People are but one of around nine million species on the planet. The planet is just one of eight (or nine planets) revolving around a star. There are one hundred billion of these stars in our galaxy. There are at least two trillion galaxies that we can observe. I am an inconsequential speck in the universe.