Happy Accidents

I think about sex a lot. As do most people, hence the long-lasting popularity of "That's what she said." and pornography.

This morning I was thinking about sex before I even got out of bed, which is not surprising since I have the extreme pleasure of sleeping next to a warm (and hot!) body every day.

However, this morning my musings were prompted not by the smooth skin and sleeping back of the lady next to me, but by a tiny foot deftly working its way towards my face. My toddler son loves to play with his sleeping parents before getting out of bed. He watches the fan spin overhead, he wallows, he wrestles with us, he makes faces; he's the class clown of the bedroom. It's really quite adorable, and much preferred to the days he wakes up whining.

As I watched the dextrous way his foot silently inched closer to my face I was struck by the fact that this crafty little man was an accident. A whole human being, with all his quirks and complexity, brought into being because two people people found each other attractive and decided not to use protection. A life, an entire life, created by chance. How amazing, how beautiful. How much more miraculous than if he'd been planned, by us or some unseen architect.

My son is a synecdoche of the whole human race. Everyone is. We are an amazingly complex miracle of chance, lucky to be here. An innumerable amount of things had to fall perfectly into place for us to happen. It's no stretch to extend this line of thinking to all life on this planet. A whole diverse world of happy accidents, living and dying and making little accidents of their own to go off and do the same. It's really quite amazing.

Now if my little miracle would only let me get some more sleep.