Your ancestors who arose from the non-living deserve a shout-out.

Scribes, anchors, columnists, and other professional worriers are already preparing us for the national agony of America’s 250th anniversary. Washington, D.C. will be draped in bunting, speeches, security barriers, and anxiety. There will be solemn talk about the reflecting pool, the fragile economy, the troubled republic, and whether anyone in government still knows how to work a copier.

Fine.

But here in Boston, we go back more than 250 years. We go back to the Pilgrims, 1620, Plymouth Rock, seasickness, starvation, bad shoes, worse weather, and the Mayflower crew discovering that the New World did not come with central heating.

But why stop there?

Let’s go back before Washington, before Boston, before Plymouth, before anyone had the poor judgment to invent town meetings.

Let’s go back before we came out of the cave, down from the trees, and out of the ocean looking for better real estate.

Let’s go all the way back to the big one: the moment life first appeared on Earth.

I propose a national celebration of our 3.5 billionth anniversary.

Not of America. Not of democracy. Not of fireworks, speeches, or men in powdered wigs. I mean the real founding event: the day our most primitive ancestors crawled out of the primordial soup and began the long, awkward family business of becoming us.

Those early ancestors were not worried about the reflecting pool.

They were not asking whether mortgage rates would come down.

They were not stuck on hold with Verizon.

They were busy inventing life on a lifeless planet.

You think you have problems?

You worry about gasoline prices, grocery bills, password resets, and whether the dishwasher repairman will arrive between 9 a.m. and the Second Coming.

Our ancestors had to invent a DNA-like recording and copying system, find energy, protect themselves inside something vaguely resembling a cell, and reproduce accurately enough not to become soup again.

And they did all this without a laboratory.

No microscopes. No grant money. No postdoctoral fellows. No white coats. No TED Talk titled, “How I Disrupted Non-Life.”

They did their research in a muddy puddle.

A puddle!

Today, a scientist complains if the lab temperature is off by two degrees. Our ancestors were running the most important experiment in history in slime, darkness, lightning, volcanic fumes, and probably the world’s first bad smell.

And yet somehow, they pulled it off.

So, show a little respect.

No one has duplicated that life-discovery trick before or since. Not once. We have split atoms, landed on the moon, invented artificial intelligence, and created cereal boxes with twelve competing health claims. But nobody has taken dead chemicals, stirred them up, and produced a living thing.

Our ancient swamp-dwelling relatives did it once, and apparently decided that was enough.

The breakthrough was so extraordinary that it took later life forms a few billion years to notice what had happened.

Then finally, after bacteria, fish, reptiles, mammals, and assorted confused relatives had taken their turns, along came one unusually alert cave fellow. He looked around at the rocks, the trees, the animals, the stars, the mud, and perhaps his brother-in-law, and said:

“Holy shit.”

And he was right.

Once there were only lifeless atoms and chemicals. Then something happened. Something organized itself. Something copied itself. Something ate, divided, adapted, survived, and eventually produced Shakespeare, Mozart, Einstein, hot pastrami, income taxes, and automated customer service.

That cave fellow may have been the brightest living thing on Earth.

Did he get praise? No.

Did anyone award him an honorary doctorate? No.

Did the local cave newsletter run a profile titled “Primitive Thinker Has Big Moment”? Absolutely not.

He was the Aristotle of the troglodytes, the brightest bulb in a very dark cave, and nobody even named a swamp after him.

But he saw it.

He understood the plot.

He gave us one hell of a story.

Far-fetched? Completely.

Implausible? Ridiculously.

True? Apparently.

You and I are walking evidence.

So yes, today we have problems. Climate change, inflation, political polarization, unemployment, software glitches, robocalls, crabgrass, traffic, and two-step authentication codes that arrive three minutes after we have lost the will to live.

But let’s keep our complaints in perspective.

We gripe about food prices. Our predecessors had to invent food and figure out how to eat it.

We complain about traffic congestion. They had to cross the microbial equivalent of Death Valley without legs.

We curse spam calls. They had no phones, no ears, and no clear evidence that being alive was even a good idea.

We struggle with passwords. They struggled with reproduction in a swamp.

And reproduction, let us admit, is still not always handled with dignity.

So, take a break.

Put your feet up.

Be grateful for your strange, slimy, heroic ancestors who solved the great problems before we arrived to complain about the small ones.

They invented life.

The least we can do is stop whining long enough to celebrate the family business.