You are a One of a Kind Miracle

I am larger and better than I thought. I did not know I held so much goodness.

--Walt Whitman

The other day, I was driving down a country road in upstate New York when a giant billboard for a car dealership caught my eye. It had a picture of a smiling infant and the words “YOU WERE BORN…PREAPPROVED.” Tears sprang to my eyes. How would the world be different if I, if you, could claim this basic trust as our birthright? How much pain would we have avoided, how much feeling odd and different, how much loneliness and fear? How less overwhelmed and more joyful would we be? How much more successful? How much less worried and more content?

As I work with clients, as I hear from readers, as I go about my day as a mother, a friend, a partner, I am constantly in awe at the unique magnificence of each and every one of the human beings that cross my path, what incredible resources of mind, body and spirit each of us possess. And I feel great sadness at how unaware so many of us are about the treasures we hold or how to use those resources to be happy and contribute our gifts to the world.

You and I were preapproved at birth. Each and every one of us is a miracle of creation. Yours and my particular mind/body/spirit has never been replicated in all the more than seventy billion human beings that have lived on this planet. From the possible combination of genes of your parents, three hundred thousand billion different humans could have been created. But you were. Your brain is the most sophisticated structure ever created, with “thirteen billion nerve cells, more than three times as many cells as there are people on the planet,” as Og Mandino writes in The Greatest Miracle in the World. And science is just beginning to understand that our minds are not solely located in our brains; other cells in our bodies seem to have intelligence as well.

Through these genetic resources and our personal histories, each and every one of us has precious unique attributes to draw upon, sterling qualities that we were born with or have developed, as well as a lifetime of experience that is our treasure store of personal wisdom. No matter how much we’ve been wounded, how defeated or unworthy we’ve been made to feel, those inner resources lie in wait at our fingertips, ready to be used on our behalf at any moment in our lives. But we have to believe that they are there and know how to open the treasure chest. In other words, we need to trust ourselves.

More next time…