Dear Reader,
I am here to address your logic, the real you. Deep down inside of every human regardless of their chosen profession or vocation; in spite of your held beliefs there is an inquisitive and empirical person lurking.
Remember when you where a child? When the natural world seemed to hold such wonder; when the words why, how and who where so common and easy off your tongue. What happened to that person?
Why do people seem to want to crush that child like sense of wonder and replace it for some form of hollow and non-existent meaning? There seems to be something lurking within the heart of my fellow man that makes us want to curl up in a ball and throw away our inquisitive nature and replace it with security and intellectual bankruptcy. This is an open letter an appeal to the you of old, to the child with in.
Why do you fear death? Death is a natural process as part of life as breathing or eating, as once put by Dawkins we are going to die and that makes use the lucky ones. You are quite frankly sickingly lucky to be here to read this here and now. If you look back to all of the events that had to take place to ensure that you may be here today you may get even a small sense of just how lucky you are. The universe had to begin in such away that matter would clump in such a way micro seconds after the big bang as to ensure the creation of the Super cluster, cluster that our own Milky way Galaxy is a part. Then an absolutely bewildering complex and interacting chain of events had to culminate in the eventual forming of our own sun and solar system.
The earth had to be such a distance from the sun, required water from passing comets, needed Jupiter to act as a shield, had to be part of a mono star system, needed the Moon to be of certain size to keep its Geo Centricity, needed plate tectonics brought about by a radioactive core…
Then once life kicked off the process of Evolution via natural selection came about, you are part of a great ancestral line. Forget about your family tree and your great uncle who was the CEO of a company; you are part of an ancestral chain that goes back over three and a half billion years a number so vast you can barley even begin to comprehend its meaning. If you where to hold out both your hands and to allow the entire span of your arms, chest and hands to encompass the history of your evolutionary history, the entire recorded history of man just fell your finger as a flake of dead skin, such is the immensity of your rich history.
To bring your absurd luckiness down to a more relatable level think of the amount of coincidences that had to culminate in your own conception, what if your father decided to stay at work for an extra five minutes, maybe the whole chain of events would have lead to him or your mother not being in the mood and someone else or maybe even no one else being here in your place to read this.
You are alive, you get your moment in the sun to be conscious to do with it what you may, you where even lucky enough to be born into a time of plenty when the world is a fairly nice place cushioned as you are in a world forged by science. You have plenty of food, entertainment and a library of information so vast you could never even hope to scratch the surface.
In light of this can you still justify your petty wants and needs? Do you really need to shelter yourself from the majesty of the natural world? Dispense of what ever is holding you back from the true you. The inquisitive, wonderful, awe struck, joyful, happy person who just wanted to know three simple things how, why and who.
Yours Sincerely,
Marc James Hugh Keys.
