For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World

by Sasha Sagan

My parents taught me that even though it’s not forever—because it’s not forever—being alive is a profoundly beautiful thing for which each of us should feel deeply grateful. If we lived forever it would not be so amazing. It doesn’t mean loss isn’t scary, it doesn’t mean it’s not hard. But for me, it has helped.

Memento mori is Latin. It means “Remember you have to die.” It was used by the Christian Church of the Middle Ages to remind parishioners that the temptations to sin during your stay on Earth will, in time, catch up with you. You will meet your maker, and the lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride you got up to here on Earth will not seem worth it. But for those of us who do not think there is a piper to be paid, or at least have different definitions of what makes right and wrong, we must still memento mori.

So much of recent human history has been a process of taking individual phenomena out of the magic or religious column and putting it in the scientific column: disease—especially mental illness—droughts, floods, earthquakes, weather, the layout of the solar system, the abundance of flora and fauna. Somewhere in that process we lost the awe. I suspect this was partly a matter of delivery. We don’t teach children science (or math, for that matter) with the passionate enthusiasm of the best preachers. And we ought to.

More astonishing things will be revealed in time, not just by our individual experiences but by the scientific method, by a deeper understanding of the mechanisms at work in our universe, by scrutinizing and testing concepts until they can become theories. Whatever it is that we have yet to learn will be part of nature once we understand it. And when we do, I hope we can still feel wonder. In those revelations and the ways the randomness, the chance, the chaos sometimes, somehow works out. Still magical. Still beautiful.

No matter what the universe has in store, it cannot take away from the fact that you were born. You’ll have some joy and some pain, and all the other experiences that make up what it’s like to be a tiny part of a grand cosmos. No matter what happens next, you were here. And even when any record of our individual lives is lost to the ages, that won’t detract from the fact that we were. We lived. We were part of the enormity. All the great and terrible parts of being alive, the shocking sublime beauty and heartbreak, the monotony, the interior thoughts, the shared pain and pleasure. It really happened. All of it. On this little world that orbits a yellow star out in the great vastness. And that alone is cause for celebration.