"Heart of Loneliness", Roberto Terracciano, Creative Commons License

Why You Should Love Yourself

J.C. LaCroix Motivation

"Heart of Loneliness", Roberto Terracciano, Creative Commons License

“Heart of Loneliness”, Roberto Terracciano, Creative Commons License

At first, when I reflect on the nature of this topic, I can’t help but take it to a bad place — where you should make sweet, sweet love to yourself. While that topic will certainly come up in this dank, dark crack in the web at some point, that isn’t the subject at hand. Allthough, once you get past the hardy-har, you aren’t that far from the truth of the matter. The simple fact is that, in an inner sense, you should always be pleasured by your presense. You should always be satisfied by your situation. And, after all this thinking, I have come up with one primary reason why:

You are a walking miracle.

And, if you don’t know that, (not think it or believe it, but experience it each time you draw breath in and blow it out) you are flippin crazy. I mean, rubbing your poo on the wall kinda bonkers.

Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

Really, being crazy is having ideas about reality that are different from what we know to be the case. Wearing a tin-foil hat to keep the aliens from reading your thoughts, or screaming that the tub of butter keeps telling you to kill all the skinny people are, in one way of looking at life, just outward signs that you have a perspective on reality that differs from the truth.

So what I’m going to do for a second is lay down what we know about the universe.

A long, long time ago, everything you see around you, and everything that exists was crammed into a central point. Then, it exploded, and raced out in every direction. Yes, kiddies, the big bang. Energy raced out and became particles, particles became atoms, atoms became stars and planets. From these dense rocks (well, at least this one we’re sitting on, we know for sure) the basics of life, bacteria, arose.

Here’s the clincher of this cliche: If any little condition were changed, any variable tweaked, any property of physics, any initial starting point, anything — none of this would be here. There are millions of possible nuances to that whole process, and one jackass so much as sneezing wrong would cause the whole thing to fizzle out.

So, this universe is one in a million.

Now, lets talk about your ancestors.

That bacteria struggled like you wouldn’t believe. The planet didn’t have an atmosphere yet — so it was constantly replicating and trying to just live in spite of solar radiation. Somewhere along the line, primitive small-scale life arose. Predators on the bacteria, specialist particle gatherers (Lightworkers and Darkworkers, maybe a fundamental part of the universe, methinks?), etc. But reflect, they just floated through what, for them, was miles and miles of empty space. Eating when they bumped into something, dying when they didn’t. Of course, you can see where I’m going with this, so fast-forward. For reasons no one can fully explain yet, life exploded on our little rock, and eventually, an ape stood up. Holy crap! All the way back to bacteria is a massive chain of life, each building upon the next to eventually produce humans. That is, self-aware life. We don’t even know how or why. What we do know is, life was in constant danger of being snuffed out — predators, natural disasters, war, disease, famine, entire world covered in ice, even friggin asteroids from outer space. And, not only did life survive all that, it continued ascending, getting better and better, until the strangest thing happened: The conscious, thinking, individual, capable of knowing itself, arose. Even if there is no purpose, and it is simply an accident, it is the most amazing accident that could have happened.

So rare, that it is one in a million planets to even have the conditions, let alone the actual occurence, of sentient life.

That means that human life, this species, is one in a billion, at least.

Of course, this brings us to the real show-stopper: Lets talk about what we know about you.

Out of all the humans that have lived, loved, hurt, and died on this planet, you have come to be. No one else, ever, has had your exact makeup, experiences, thoughts, talents, and ideas. Every molecule of your DNA, combined with every moment in your memory, has been precisely shaped and formed to give rise to something completely, utterly, amazingly, unique.

Resisting the point? Tick it back then.

The odds were against this universe coming to be, let alone exactly the way it did. This planet had to form precisely the way it did to yield itself, then conditions had to unfold precisely as they did to yield life upon it. That life had to reach out, suffer and survive, to produce your species, which then had to conquer that very same world to continue into the future. Hell, the odds were even against you at conception.

Each and every atom, feeling, moment, event, everything that has happened over billions of years, down to the smallest variable, to the tiniest nano-second had to occur exactly the way it did to give rise to: You. Sitting there and breathing. Thinking. Living.

You! Right there, yes, you.

A walking miracle.

This is NOT mumbo-jumbo. I’m not laying down some ugga-bugga new age trip. I have laid down simple, empirical science. Fact. I have discussed only those things we know beyond doubt to be true about the universe, how it came to be, and how you got here.

Wow! If, knowing that, you don’t look at yourself with awe, I don’t know what to say. If you don’t look in the mirror and see the absolute beauty of who you were, are, and will be, then you are deluding yourself.

And, if you don’t smile somtimes, thinking about how unique you are — then you are totally apeshit nuts.

Because any belief you have that says you are simple, average, ordinary, less than special, limited, ugly, broken, not capable, or anything less than extraordinary, is, well, tin-foil-hat wearing guy, or the butter-talking-mass-murder lady.

It simply runs contrary to what we know to be true.

Get my point?