Hello out there

I think it is wonderful that out of all the possible events in all the possible dimensions of all the possible layers of all the possible universes, I got the privilege of being inside my skin right now right here looking out at all of you.

I think I have it figured out

I had a beginning. I didn't come from some metaphysical level of heaven. I didn't come from some previous life. My mother and father made me. Before the merger of my parents' gametes, the spermatozoon and ovum, I did not exist. At all. Anywhere. And even then when I was a zygote, that combination of the spermatozoon and ovum, I was not me. That zygote was the only thing that could become me, but it was not me yet. (A little farther back, only those two gametes could have been me. Gametes do not contain the same DNA information as the cells of the body in which they were produced, so each gamete is at least slightly different from any other and the reason that brothers and sisters may resemble but are not the same.) As the zygote cells continued to divide and form an embryo, I still was not me. If the cell division had not gone normally, I still would not have been me. But it did go normally, and the embryo that was to be me grew and divided into me, and I was born.

The individual got started at fertilization (I had a beginning, remember?), but the point at which that individual became me is unknown. Some say at conception (I doubt it; not all conceptions result in an embryo, much less a child, and not all babies develop with brains, and no brain = no personality (and no person because the baby can't live)), and some say when the brain starts functioning, some say we are always a work in progress. Some, like me, are willing to admit we just do not know.

The fact I had a beginning is evident. Statistics tell me I shall have an end. Where do I go at this end? To the same place I was when I began. Where is that place? No place. As I began, I will cease. I may cease to be before my body does; no brain = no personality, remember? But I will cease if statistics hold true.

To come from no place and to go back there again, and to spend the interim in an absolutely unique body, different from every other of the 6-plus billion human bodies on the planet, yet made in the same image - what melded mundanity and miracle.