If you’ve never realized how small you are, you should stop to think about the reality of your existence. The universe is vast and cataclysmal and you are an inconsequential speck in the span of it. And yet, you are still an integral and necessary being without whose presence the world would not be how it is. Isn’t that in itself miraculous?

Our finite brains can’t comprehend the enormity of the state we live in, let alone the universe in which we reside. A universe that is just as alive as we are. A universe that, somehow, we still control and effect. Because as much as life is an illusion, it is also poignant and remarkable. You are given what you need. There is a greater force at work that we theorize about but can’t quite definitely understand. And maybe that’s just how it needs to be. Because if everything were explained, there would be nothing left to figure out. There would be no journey or development or growth. We are all essentially still in a childlike state when you consider what we know compared to the knowledge of the universe. But we lose the wonder.

We lose the wonder because we are gutted by our lives. We are literally and metaphorically cut open, killed and left to either resurrect ourselves or sit in that nothingness. What compels me to believe in humanity, and what keeps me in love with people, is that most often, we choose the former.

You do have love. It’s surrounding you and it’s brought you here. It’s so easy to forget where you are when you stare at the same four walls day-in-and-day-out. You can feel as though your part-time job waiting tables yields no consequence. But all while you’re distracted by the mundane and the ordinary, the miraculous surrounds you, you’re just blind to it.

There are stars colliding and life is evolving and things are transforming and existence is coming and going, it is, always will, and has been even in the 5 seconds it just took you to read that sentence. Whenever you feel hopeless, all you need to do is go outside and realize that you have been molded into human form for some reason. You are somewhere you may never be again. Your actions, no matter how inconsequential you think they may be, have been essential.

Pain is part of the process. It’s part of the miraculousness. You see it when light shines through storm clouds, in the refracting lights of supernovas, in the fact that you must be in a physical state to comprehend the physical things around you– sight, sound, material. But it is also those senses that facilitate your pain. All of these things are rooted in suffering, and yet they all yield the miraculous. So be here. Be part of what you’re sewn into. Bloom where you’re planted. Be aware of the greatness that you are and realize that without you, the seaming of this mysteriously interconnected world would cease to exist as it is. Hope is never gone, it’s just ignored.