A Risky Bet is a Successful Bet – Marginalian

We place life's bets on countless numbers of possibilities, consciousness and unconsciousness, to discover again and again how narrow they are to the realms of the possible, which always include but exceed the possible. It helps to remember that we ourselves are children of impossibility, that everything we value does not exist because it was supposed to, not because it was possible or necessary, but because the universe gambled against otherwise incredible odds.

THE OLDEST BET IS THE WINNING BET
by Maria Popova

You wouldn't bet on it,
a rock that is struck
orbiting a star
from the discount bin
of the universe,
I wouldn't have guessed
that it will bloom
mitochondria and music,
that it will be mushrooms
mountains and minds,

and a hummingbird wing
blowing quickly a hundred times
rather than your eye blinking,

and your eye that took
five hundred million years
from trilobite to telescope,

and a slow orange lichen
growing in black stone
slowly two hundred times
there are tectonic plates underneath
they split in half

and the marbled orca
carrying his dead calf
under the whole limit
continent,
bearing weight
of the mind

and understanding
how are the windows
this building
of respiration and bone
surprisingly,
how it goes over everything,
big and unnecessary,
like music,
like love.