“Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time
immemorial to a favored evolutionary line, but you have also been
extremely- make that miraculously- fortunate in your personal ancestry.
Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older
than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, everyone of your
forbears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate,
healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and
circumstanc
es to live long enough to do
so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned,
starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected
from it's life quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to
the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only
possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -
eventually, astoundingly, and all to briefly- in you.”
--Bill Bryson
My life's story theme *mashup*, as only poet Robert Frost can convey:
"I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference...
...The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep."
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