Rumor has it that most normal men send at least eight million “forward swimming” sperm looking for an egg every sexual act. Don’t even bother adding in egg variation, or the total number of sperm that may have had a fighting chance during your mother’s days of fertility when you were conceived (or the possibility that she might have taken her friends’ advice and shunned your father). Keep it simple and wildly conservative. Your chances of being here were about one out of eight million. Funny. Those were my odds too. The chances of us both being here? One out of sixty-four trillion. The chances of us both being on the same round planet, leaning far enough away from the sun that our nostrils freeze shut but we don’t die? The chances of us both being on the same round planet buzzing around the same star, with six billion other very particular people all simultaneously in existence? It makes me tired, like the cold. And I don’t know what numbers bigger than a googolplex are called, especially since a googol is supposed to be bigger than the number of elementary particles in the “observable universe” (whatever that means), and a googolplex is a one with that many zeros after it. I’ve been told that the whole concept was invented by a nine-year-old named Milton.

But I’m not letting it rest. Not yet. One more round of odds. Start with your grandparents. What were the odds of all four of them blinking, crying, and discovering that they existed? Assuming that surviving, finding each other, and getting married was a sure thing (and keeping the variables limited to a single procreative act), what were the odds of both your parents being conceived? Assuming that finding each other and getting to work on you was also a sure thing, what were the odds that you would be the result?

One out of 2.097152 . . . wait . . . I think I just screwed that up. Duodecillion? No. That only has thirty-nine zeros. Should we just go with umpteen? You get the point, don’t you? You basically have no chance of being here and you should quit trying already. Getting your hopes up will only make it hurt more when you don’t happen.

We are a world of lottery winners. For every one of us here right now, in every begetting, there were at least 7,999,999 losers. They don’t even know how almost they were.

 “I wish I’d never been born,” the adolescent moans.

 “Shut up, Randy. There are eight million other kids who would be wishing they could be here right now if only they were here to wish.”

 N.D. Wilson, Notes from the Tilt-a-whirl