Just Be

There’s always something about midnight that makes you think of the weirdest things, like why pizza comes in triangle pieces joined in a circle and fixed in a square box, or how sure we are that Sunday is supposed to be the first day of the week, or how come a mosquito freely spreads malaria but can’t get infected with AIDS if it were to take the blood from a person with the virus.

I could write a whole book about the weird things that come to mind, but I’ll blame it on the silence. Maybe I always have them, but the silence makes them loud enough for me to hear. So today I was thinking of how life is unfair right from the womb. Another weird thought, but stay with me.

Every human being was once a sperm cell who had to swim so fast and forward to an egg. And for you to have become you, it means you were the strongest and fastest. Automatically, all other sperm cells had to die because you emerged first. Some of them weren’t fast or strong, and others couldn’t even swim forward. How fair is that?

But you know what? Let’s put that sob story for another day and focus on something else. You and I emerged as winners even at that time when we were tiny particles with technically no resources. There were millions of these tiny particles alongside us. Some of them died on the journey, others probably gave up, and others branched towards the wrong direction, but you and I, we got to our destination.

As I’ve already painted the picture above, it was more like there were millions of people (including you) fighting for one position, and you fought a good fight to get the position. And it didn’t only end there; after getting the position, you kept fighting for 9 more months to undergo a transition from that world to this one.

There were days you were hungry, exhausted, bored, and probably confused, but you still kept going. You were there, and all that you did was to exist and be present, which was all that mattered. But the most interesting thing happened after your transition. You came to the world, and the world put some kind of pressure on you, so you started measuring your worth with what you do. And since then, you have always been on the move trying to get busy.

Of course, nobody is asking you to be lazy. So work hard, be productive, but sometimes just be. Allow yourself to just be. Your value has nothing to do with what you do; it’s in your existence and your being. You’ve been a winner pretty much from the womb, and you are still winning, so don’t allow the noise from the world to let you forget that your existence is already enough.