I am here, all of us are here, because of an incomprehensible chain of a series of events, each of them as vital as any other, any of which, if they had happened to happen differently, would’ve negated our existence.
If anything, any part of it, no matter how seemingly small or trivial, hadn’t happened, I would not be here right now.
Possibly, someone else would be here in my place, or no one would be here at all.
If at the moment of conception, or to be a little more accurate, and pedantic, slightly before it, your father had sneezed, which caused him to shift his position ever so slightly, the lucky sperm that won the race, and specifies half of your genes, would’ve been a different one than the one that it was.
That different one would only share half of its genes with the one that it actually was, which would’ve caused the child that resulted from that conception to share only three fourths of its genes with you.
While that child would be similar to you, more so than any siblings you may have, it would not be you, it would be a different person, it may even have been of the opposite sex.
So a sneeze, caused by a grain of pollen, could have prevented you from existing.
Or if a comet that some ancient king took to be an omen, had been struck 78,391,326.0067 years ago by a meteor the size of a grapefruit, which shifted its orbit ever so slightly, and caused it to plunge into the sun 60 million years later, which caused the king to decide that he war he would otherwise have started wasn’t that good of an idea as he first thought, which caused a person who would’ve been killed to give birth to a child who’s great-granddaughter murdered one of your distant ancestors.
The tiniest event causes ripples of changes to spread throughout the universe, each of these changes causes its own ripples, and these chains of changes have the power to alter the course of history.
If almost anything, no matter how seemingly insignificant had been different in the past, the present would be a different one.
Everything that has happened up to and including now relies upon similarly long, complicated, winding, and drawn out chains of happenstance and extraordinarily unlikely and improbable events.
What I have trouble getting my head around, is the thought if my sense of me, my ego, would’ve been removed from existence, or if it would belong to someone else.