“If there is joy, or progress, or enlightenment, or love to be had, it must be had now: between your birth and your death; as fast and fiercely as you can. All we have is the breath in our bodies and a finite share of seconds, and each one must be spent with the same joyous reverence as a gold coin.
This is because, at 19, I’d read a sentence that had re-terraformed my head: “The level of matter in the universe has been constant since the Big Bang.”
In all the aeons we have lost nothing- not a speck, not a grain, not a breath. The universe is simply a sealed, twisting kaleidoscope that has reordered itself a trillion trillion trillion times over.
Each baby, then, is a unique collision- a cocktail, a remix- of all that has come before: made from molecules of Napoleon and stardust and comets and whale tooth; colloidal mercury and Cleopatra’s breath: and with the same darkness that is between the stars between, and inside, our own atoms.
When you know this, you suddenly see the crowded top deck of a bus, in the rain, as a miracle: this collection of people is by way of a stardust constellation. Families are bright, irregular-shaped nebulae. Finding a person you love is like galaxies colliding. We are all peculiar, unrepeatable, perambulating, micro-universes- we have never been before, and we will never be again. Oh God, the sheer exuberant, unlikely fact of our existences. The honour of being alive. They will never be able to make you again. Don’t you dare waste a second of it thinking something better will happen when it ends. Don’t you dare.”
— Caitlin Moran
I read this passage from an article on the bus and choked up. If there is any need for reassurance of your life- this might possibly be of help to you.