The Lucky Amoeba

It floats around in water, and when it senses food nearby, it extends from its shapeless center to create temporary arms called pseudopods. The diagram looked something like this.

The amoeba reaches out from its middle to create a big body-hug and brings the food directly to its middle for digestion.

Even though the amoeba has no brain, I couldn’t help imagining that the food feels delicious to this microscopic being, that this one cell feels satisfaction, a universally recognizable “yum.”

I thought: what an amazing little creature this amoeba is, what a miracle that this tiny thing can eat this way!

And then I thought how the amoeba is lucky to be given its life. I imagined being given the opportunity to step from nonbeing into the existence of an amoeba, an existence where I would have the ability to sense, to move, to grow and even reproduce.

The step from non-life to life struck me as an unfathomable gift.

And then I considered the jump from the amoeba’s luck to my own, my existence as a human. I thought of the eons of evolution separating the first amoeba from the first human, and all the increased sensory abilities that developed and were bestowed on me: the sense of touch in my hands, the music I could hear, the pleasures and pains of human life, the understanding, all of it. Being able to gaze at the stars.

I started to consider every human birth lucky.

And among humans, how fortunate was I, living at the end of the second millennium, benefiting from humanity’s advancements, social, political and technological?

Even though I was still a kid, I thought that if I were to die on the spot, I would still be one of the luckiest beings that ever lived.

This way of seeing the gift of life became foundational, always at the back of my mind. A touchstone for gratitude, preventing me from feeling too sorry for myself.

I remember the lucky amoeba. I hope that now you will, too.

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