“We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything
that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives,
of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our
experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.” -George
Bernard Shaw All that is real about ourselves is nothing to be
ashamed about; quite to the contrary, it’s something to be
eminently thankful for. This very existence is all we have, and
while it’s minuscule compared to the entire Universe, it
required the entire Universe to bring us to the point where it’s
possible for us to exist. What do I mean by that? (The turkey
that many of us will be eating tomorrow is perhaps our
160,000,000th cousin, some 50,000,000 times removed.) But those
same atoms that now make us up — that millions of years ago made
up our ancestors — have been around on our planet since its
birth, some 4.5 billion years ago. And where did those atoms
come from? Practically all of the atoms we find on Earth:
Nitrogen, Oxygen, Carbon, Iron, Silicon, Su