It is there like a constant whisper, like a ceaseless gust of thought rustling through the canopy of the collective mind: the haunting sense that ours is a particularly difficult time to be alive, that reality today is particularly hard to bear. Such sentiments are errors of proximity — we live too close to the bone of our personal predicaments, have drawn the horizon of time too close to see the of chance.

Ursula K. Le Guin believed that the great instrument of our works of the imagination, and of science fiction in particular, is “distancing” — “the pulling back from ‘reality’ in order to see it better” by exposing the “coherent complexity” we are part and revealing “reality translated to a higher plane, a more passionate intensity, than most of us can experience at all without the help of art or religion or profound emotion.” And yet given that the imagination of nature will always surpass our own because we are a figment of it, given that science is the instrument we have invented to decipher and translate the language in which nature imagines reality into being, then science itself can offer us this lens-clearing distancing without an ounce of fiction — nowhere more so than in pulling us back from the mundanity of our lives in order to behold with bewilderment the miraculousness, the fantastical improbability, of life itself; of what Le Guin called “the scene of our mortality.”

That is what physicist and novelist Alan Lightman explores in a wonderful Atlantic essay contemplating the bright improbability of life, from the cosmic dice of star formation to the cellular roulette of biological conception. Having written so movingly about the poetic science of what happens when we die, he turns his sensitive intellect toward the poetic science of what had to happen so that we may live. With an eye to how difficult it is for us to regard ourselves as part of just another civilization that will go the way of the Aztecs and the Greeks, he reflects:

It is even more difficult to fathom how unique each of us is, how improbable, how lucky to be alive at all… Far more possible arrangements of human DNA exist than there are atoms in the observable universe — each arrangement corresponding to a different human being. One of those many possible arrangements is each of us.

The fact of any one human being, he observes, is a triumph against the staggering odds that accompany every fertilization attempt — about a hundred thousand billion to one, numbers so immense that they bleed into abstraction we can’t apprehend. He offers a startling visualization:

If you took a very long ruler that stretched from here to the planet Pluto, one inch of that distance would be you. The rest of the distance would be other possible human beings that could have been, but never were. Each of us has won a lottery with a hundred thousand billion different players.

If hope is the work of believing that the improbable is possible — believing that the wildest bet can be the winning bet — then each of us is a living axiom of hope. Alan writes:

Being alive at all is the most extraordinary stroke of good luck we will ever experience. Yet it is the easiest to overlook, to take for granted. We wake up in the morning, have our coffee, make breakfast, send the kids off to school, go to our jobs, move through our routines, worry about deadlines, check off items on our to-do list. And we forget that beneath all of it lies something profoundly rare: existence itself. The simple fact that we are here, conscious and aware, is so unlikely that it borders on the miraculous… From the distant past, billions of years ago, to the distant future, billions of years ahead, the universe will never see another one of you.

We don’t have a right to life, to this unbidden gift of chance, but we have a responsibility to it — one the poet and astronomer Rebecca Elson so perfectly termed “a responsibility to awe.” Agains the backdrop of our own improbability, even the subtlest posture of entitlement becomes absurd, anti-natural; the only adequate posture is to kneel in the “cosmic overwhelm,” saying over and over the shortest prayer there is: “Thanks.”