themarginalian.org · 6 hours ago

The Wildest Bet Is the Winning Bet – the Marginalian

Maria Popova's poem "The Wildest Bet Is the Winning Bet" moves through deep time and small wonders - trilobite eyes, orange lichen, a grieving orca - to arrive at something difficult to say plainly but impossible to unfeel. The poem holds that existence itself is the longest odds ever beaten, and that this fact should reorient how we receive being alive. "Consciousness," she writes, "hovers over everything, gigantic and unnecessary, like music, like love" - a line that earns its weight by the time it arrives. Read aloud by Nick Cave and animated by Brazilian artist Daniel Bruson, the work reminds us that improbability is not a reason for despair but the very ground of gratitude.