It is unfathomable how much care is in the world.

The Virgin, Gustav Klimt (1913)

You and I both exist in an unbroken line of births since the first bilateral animal.

Hundreds of thousands of ancestors. Every single one was first young, shaking and vulnerable to the world. They had to seek warmth from the cold, hide from danger, step slowly into the vast space of the unknown. As adults, they fought to protect us, their children, bleeding and even dying so that we could live. Over and over, thousands of times.

At some point in the last million years you and I had a great ancestress mother. Wide eyed and curious as a young girl, she laughed and cried playing with the other children. Her mother nursed her for four days as she was struck down with sickness. She was cheered on by the elders the day she could start a fire herself. As members of her group passed on, not infrequently, she mourned aloud. When her body matured and grew to bear children, she protected them from the animals, soothed them in their disease, and taught her children what she knew.

It is unfathomable how much care is in the world.

Each book we touch has years of soul poured in. It was hundreds of people whose sweat dampened the floors of the factory that your bicycle came out of. Generations of pioneers, late nights, drunken arguments, lifetimes into perfecting the warp and weft of the cotton in your t-shirt.

What touches me most is the earnest outpourings that vanish in an instant. The acrobat dangling his legs overhead in a one-armed handstand, the improvised piano concerto in D minor, the playful glance between two strangers in parallel subway cars.

What a splendor to float in the sea of care that surrounds us.