Einstein once said, “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
But what is a miracle?
Do miracles really exist or we just consider mere coincidences as miracles?
My wife and I were – as is our wont – going on our morning walk the other day. A t-shirt with this catchy phrase caught our eyes. It said, “I believe in miracles”.
We started discussing miracles and what does believing in miracles mean.
WHAT IS A MIRACLE?
Let’s look at the dictionary meaning of the word “miracle”:
- a surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency.
- a highly improbable or extraordinary event, development, or accomplishment that brings very welcome consequences.
I used to believe in the first definition.
I used to hope and wait for a miracle to just happen in my life, like, hoping to win a lottery ticket. I believed in miracles in this way for a long time until my perspective for miracles changed altogether.
So, what made me change my perspective on miracles?
GRATITUDE
I believe in the power of gratitude. It’s only after I became grateful that I started recognizing miracles around me.
Yes, miracles do exist and they exist around us. We need to be grateful enough to appreciate and recognize these miracles.
I can now recognize these miracles 100X better than I used to.
Here is a sample of miracles that I can recognize now, among many others:
- Life itself is a miracle. It is so rare. So improbable. So extraordinary. Don’t believe me? Search the Universe for another place where there is life. You are likely to agree with me.
- Our self-awareness is a miracle.
- Each person is a miracle. You don’t believe you are a miracle? Do the math. The sheer probabilities are astounding. I will show the math below.
- Natural phenomena are miracles.
- DNA is a miracle. Did you know that you and I have so much DNA that if we laid it end-to-end, it would go from here to the moon and back a few hundred thousand times?
- The transistor is a miracle. Electronics is a miracle. Digital technology is a miracle.
- OK, the COVID pandemic is a Black Swan event. But our ability to communicate globally and work together to manage and – eventually – defeat it is a miracle.
I can go on and on.
I promised to deconstruct the birth of a baby as a miracle. Here it is:
Let’s say a human baby has a couple of trillion cells and starts with 2: one from mom and another from dad, forming a zygote by the process known as fertilization.
Then starts a 9-month process of division of this zygote according to one of the most complicated orchestras in the world. This one cell divides into 2, 2 into 4, 4 into 8, and so on until the baby is fully formed at birth.
If you do the math, there are about 41 successive divisions and about 2 trillion steps. Can you imagine a biology factory with 2 trillion steps happening over 9 months?
Know what’s a miracle? 96-97% of all babies are born healthy!
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Can you imagine that?
In a factory with 2 trillion manufacturing steps, 96 to 97 products that come out are “healthy”. That’s a miracle. No question about it.
Now, can you recognize the miracles around you?
Well, just the way miracles exist, there’s always some uncertainties of life. However, you can cope up with those when you have an optimistic mindset.
Watch this space to know how to deal with the unpredictability of life!
Why don’t you write 10 miracles that you probably never recognized before as miracles and send it to us at support@mygrowth.academy? We would love to know what are the things you’re grateful for.