"...you and I in all our ordinariness.."

"We are going to die" is an unusual first sentence for a favourite quote but, like the hapless Alvy Singer in Annie Hall, who says "I'm obsessed with uh, with death, I think. Big - big subject with me, yeah.", I too am quite taken with the theme.  Of course Woody Allen's Alvy goes on to say that he's 'pessimistic' about life and that life in general is divided up into two categories - "the horrible and the miserable".  I don't necessarily agree, but then I am a relatively lucky member of the human race, so I'm not sure my opinion counts as much as others.

"We are going to die..." is the first bit of one of my favourite quotes and I love it because it sounds depressing, but is deceptively so.  The quote goes on to read "..., and that makes us the lucky ones.  Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.  The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of the Sahara.  Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton.  We know this because the possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. (And here's my favourite part) In the teeth of these stupifying odds it is you and I, in all our ordinariness, that are here."

Well, I do not for one minute think that the author of those words is in any way 'ordinary' but he does, however, speak for me and for most of us.  Professor Richard Dawkins wrote this in his beautiful and influential work Unweaving the Rainbow  (the title of which alludes to a Keats poem) and I underlined this part straight away.  I drank it up, like Keat's hemlock, and let the words and sounds and images run down my throat until I was lulled by them.  I love them because they comfort me.  I don't like the inspirational quote nearly as much as the confronting one - the one that makes you stop and re-read it, and then re-read it again. "We are going to die" reads better to me than any Hallmark card.  It's the sort of thing I think about when I should be doing other things.

And I love 'ordinariness'.  I am ordinary in all my neuroses and rituals and idiosyncracies - and in my striving to be anything other than ordinary. 

My husband is ordinary in his habits and personality disorder (!) and his Germanic handling of all things do with life. 

My daughter is ordinary in her 15 year-old self-obsessed notions of the world and her helio-centric place in it; in her beautiful colt-slim legs, chocolate-brown eyes and over-straightened hair.

And my son wishes he were ordinary, and most of the time he is just that - in his anxieties about his place in the world, in his opinions, his compassions and his vulnerable tofu-boy-heart.  He is a little me walking around in a 13 year-old boy's body and even that, with its strange connotations, is still ordinary.

I love the fact that one day I am going to die.  And I mean this in just the way that Dawkins suggests it - I am one of the lucky ones.  I got to be born in the first place. I got to love and laugh and hurt and feel pain; I got to cry and adore and protect and sacrifice for. I got a chance at immortality through the genes that I will pass on and the lives I will, in tiny and probably insignificant ways, shape. And that, in itself, is enough to get me through the rough days.