Last Sunday I held an Aliveness workshop in Costa Rica. I asked a room full of people to close their eyes and travel back in time and imagine their ancestors… going back, beyond their grandparents, to the beginning of EVERYTHING.
In this newsletter I would like to take you on the same journey, and land you somewhere unexpected.
Paid subscribers can listen to the full workshop recording, found at the end of this letter.
When someone says ancestors, you probably picture human faces. A grandmother. A great-uncle in a photo. Go back far enough and the faces turn into strangers and somewhere around a few hundred years, unless you do an official ancestry search, the trail goes cold.
I want to take you a lot further back than that.
Beyond faces.
Beyond people altogether…
Going waaaaay back
Four and a half billion years ago there was no Earth. There was only matter in the form of dust and gas. The leftovers of dead stars that were drifting about in the dark.
Gravity started pulling all this matter together. Rocks slowly merged into a spinning disc, which in turn formed into a young molten planet. That was our planet, forming around an ordinary star.
Then, somewhere in the first billion years, something happened that we are only just beginning to understand. In a warm volcanic pool, a cluster of chemicals did something nothing had ever done before. It copied itself. One single-celled organism, but alive.
Our first ancestor. And the lineage it started never broke. Not in nearly four billion years.
Over millions of years those cells became more and more complex. They clustered, they specialised, they learned to swim.
For a stretch of time so long (the number is ludicrous to a human mind), everything that was alive lived in water.
Then about 375 million years ago some beast dragged itself out of the shallows, onto the mud and took a breath.
Every animal that ever walked came from that creature. Fish into amphibians. Amphibians into the beings that became reptiles and mammals. And eventually a small, clever, upright ape that became… US.
Every one of the animals in this lineage is your ancestor. The cell. The fish. The creature in the mud. The ape.
This is not a pretty metaphor. It is an actual chain of parents and children, each one hanging on just long enough to pass life down the line, all the way back to the dust of dead stars.
For you to be here, right now, in this life… every single ancestor in that chain had to survive long enough to have the next offspring.
The cell. The fish. The thing in the mud. Every mammal. Every human, right down the line, through ice ages and famines and predators and plagues and wars. And not one of them died first. One break, anywhere, at any point in four billion years, and you’re simply never born.
Take a second now to imagine how many beings had to live and die, struggle and survive, so that you could be here today, reading this newsletter.
The odds of you existing are absurd. I asked Chat GPT to calculate the odds and at first it said it couldn’t… the calculation was too hard. After pressing, the AI came back with this:
The odds of you existing as the exact person you are have been estimated at roughly 1 in 10²,⁶⁸⁵,⁰⁰⁰. That is 1 followed by about 2.7 million zeros.
Wow. And here you are anyway, conscious, breathing and reading a string of little black symbols called words and turning them into meaning in your head, which is itself a miracle we never once stop to be amazed by. And yet, we often do not appreciate this miracle because we are conditioned to take life for granted.
Why do we take life for granted? Because we are not aware of our mortality. We live in a culture that avoids thinking about that subject at all costs… even though it is the only certainty in life.
Last Sunday when I sat in the workshop and did the cosmic ancestry visualisation, I felt what I always feel. A wave of gratitude for the miracle of existence… against all the odds.
That the whole crazy, impossible ancestral line held, and the thing it produced at the end of it was a life. Mine. Yours. The person two seats down who you’d never have met if a fish had made a different decision 375 million years ago.
And then I drift back and forget
Remember for a second that you are the end point of the most improbable winning streak in the history of the universe. And last Tuesday, if you’re anything like me, you spent half of it on your phone, mildly annoyed about something you won’t remember by Wednesday, putting off something important I know I need to do.
That’s something I kept spotting when I sat with dying people as an end-of-life guide. Almost nobody at the end holds regrets about what they did in life. It’s what they didn’t do. The risk not taken. The words left unsaid. The life they were too afraid to live.
They'd been given the rarest thing there is… a life, against impossible odds. And they spent it believing there'd always be more time, until the morning came when there wasn't.
Knowing you’ll die isn’t morbid. It’s the only thing strong enough to make you stop sleepwalking through the one impossible gift you were ever given.
That’s what Aliveness is all about. Living like you mean it, because you know it ends.
Before you go
The two-minute aliveness practice. Try it tomorrow as you awake in bed, before you reach for your phone.
Remember you are mortal. Remember to be grateful for being alive. Then pick one thing to do today that the whole long chain of ancestors would be glad of. A phone call. An honest sentence. One thing off the shelf marked someday.
Then go and do it.
To unlock and listen to the full audio recording of Sunday’s live Aliveness workshop please consider becoming a paid subscriber. The sessions includes the whole journey back through time, the story behind Aliveness, the eighteen-minute ultimate meditation and the 2 minute daily Aliveness practice.
This week’s question:
If you really felt that not one ancestor in four billion years broke the chain to get you here, what would you stop putting off?
Please reply and tell me. It might be the nudge someone else needs.
Make the most of the time you have.
Live happy,
Hoppy
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I am a former CEO & filmmaker, as well as a trained Soul Midwife and Druidic Bard. Aliveness emerged from my own near death experiences, sitting with the dying, and the wisdom of the Stoics, Buddhists and great thinkers on mortality. My dream is that Aliveness will become as impactful as Mindfulness: a daily practice helping people live more bravely, leave fewer regrets and create a more present and generous world.
