A Thanksgiving Appreciation!

​Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!  No law this time, but perhaps a topic of conversation at the dinner table tomorrow, to help us avoid any of those topics that might have caused projectile silverware or glasses of wine used as splashy conversation enders.  So, here goes.

Just look around the table and then consider what the odds are that all of us would ever be here in the first place.  Let's start with some basics.  The people who keep track of things like demographics estimate that there have been about 109 billion people since we started walking somewhat erect and processing more thoughts than a jellyfish.  If that's even remotely accurate, then it's a pretty long shot that any one of us is here right now at all.  And if there are a dozen of us around this one table, just think of the odds that all of us would have made it from the primordial ooze to this moment in the almost infinite history of things. 

Let's break this down another way.  Homo sapiens are believed to have existed for the past 300,000 years.  If we assume 20 years per generation - people didn't live much longer until pretty recently - that's 15,000 generations since that first hot night in the cave.  And if we speculate that our lines of descent stretch back that far, then during each one of those generational encounters, it was likely just a random event that enabled our ancestors to survive until the next generation.  That means our luck had to have held during 15,000 such occasions, or we wouldn't be here today.  So, if any two of those distant nanas and grampas hadn't found each other, our family tree would have put down its roots somewhere else entirely.  To put it in contemporary terms, we had to win the lottery 15,000 times in a row to be asking for another helping of creamed leeks right now.

But we don't need to go back anywhere near that far to understand the point.  Just think about our ancestors since America's first birthday almost 250 years ago.  If the males hadn't survived the intervening wars; if they'd died haying in the fields in the hot sun or dropping trees on themselves trying to build the homestead; or if the females had died in childbirth or the children hadn't made it through those first treacherous months of untreatable diseases, we wouldn't be here now.  Or if our parents hadn't met on that blind date or it hadn't gone well; or if they hadn't lived or gone to school near enough to each other to have had that date at all; or if one of their families had moved away and that was the end of it right there; we wouldn't be here now.

So, what's my point in all this?  It's simply that we have an awful lot to be thankful for just to be sitting here at this very moment.  And instead of arguing over things we can't change during the next hour or so - things that will only distract us from the need for serious thankfulness - let's make the most of this convergence of our extraordinary good luck and enjoy it like our lives have depended on it.  Because they did and they do.