Today I watched the orange half orb of sun emerging from the ocean’s edge – bringing warmth, colour, life. Doing its daily magic. So remarkable, largely unremarked.

We are mostly too busy to gaze at the rising light or to stand in awe under a vault of sky so vast you could spend 100 lifetimes tracking and counting its layers of tiny lights, pulsing in the cold night’s quietness.

I think we have lost the sense of wonder at our existence – that we lack not just the the time but the humility.

Instead we  keep cycling through a bunch of ego-based propositions to justify our place in the universe.

“I think therefore I am.” Descartes’ famous base for a philosophical system that underpins much of modern life has a whole family of counterparts. Whether it’s capitalism’s “I accumulate therefore …” or its market corollary “I consume therefore..”; from the simplest “I survive therefore…” through the “me” generation’s “I self express therefore …” to today’s social media version “I tweet therefore I am” – the whole proposition is back to front.

When I give myself the time to stop and wonder, when I watch that orange half orb creep over the dark horizon like a blessing, I know that I exist because of the unique and anomalous accident of a planet that is able to sustain my life.

It sustains me therefore I am …it is such a simple concept.

Maybe if we could regain the sense of awe, humility and wonder that we exist only because of the extraordinary benevolence of our environment, then we might avoid destroying it.