The chance of a lifetime

July 22, 2025

Photo by Lucas Santos on Unsplash

To begin personally on a confessional note, I was at one time, at my outset, a single cell.—Lewis Thomas, from Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir

It was my first day of first grade, when, around mid-morning, Sister Christine Marie announced that we could get up from our newly appointed desks and have a snack if we brought one.

I stood up but didn’t move, as I knew what was in my lunch bag: an unrefrigerated bologna sandwich and two Oreos, the menu of my youth and the contents of 99% of all future lunch bags. Not having a snack nor knowing any of the other thirty-some kids, I didn’t know what to do with myself. So I stood there, nervously glancing around.

Suddenly a vaguely familiar-looking boy with freckles came vaulting over to me from across the room, hopping over chairs and wearing a big grin. “Hey, Kinslow!” His name was Dion Mulvaney, a kid from church I didn’t know I knew. From that day forward, Dion and I would walk home from school together; we became best friends. We remained close until the fateful day in sixth grade when Dion made the basketball team and I did not, some girls made the cheerleading squad and others did not, and social life for all the kids in our class divided along parquet lines for the rest of our time at St. Mary’s.

But oh, that first day. It surely wasn’t the last time I would feel lucky, but I believe it may have been the first. It was a feeling so profound that I remember that first grade classroom and the layout of the desks as if it were yesterday. I can still remember how surprised, and, frankly, relieved I felt when I saw Dion hurtling toward me as if he’d just been launched by NASA.

And I wonder: Is it possible to feel that kind of lucky, the kind that makes you think the gods are on your side and the universe is their willing accomplice, with the mere fact that you are alive? The stardust that became our planet; the carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen that then emanated from that stardust; the randomness of those elements coming together to form our ur-ancestors; the thousands upon thousands of decisions made by our forebears to survive violence, hunger, disease and natural disasters … all so we could be here, communicating in a language that also developed randomly … is that not the epitome of luck?

The physician and author Lewis Thomas once wrote that he and you and I can all trace our lineage back to a single bacterial cell. Not only is that humbling to contemplate, it is awe-inspiring to think of the countless pathways of biological desks and chairs that that cell’s original DNA had to vault over to arrive at you.

Maybe we are luckier than we think.