Jim Hopkins: 33 reasons to make us all feel more alive

The world spins and the universe expands and Chile's 33 miners are now back on the crust of the Earth, returned to their lives from the darkness of an unwelcome tomb.

They are reborn, drawn up a shaft as thin as a drain in a journey that has about it some faint echo of birth itself.

Take a bow, humanity. We made it happen. Or, more precisely, our inventions did.

So many inventions from so many inventors: cables and pulleys and machines that harness electricity; gears and cogs and pumps making oxygen; wires and winches and wirelesses, too.

And there, turning slowly on top of its simple wooden frame, raising the Phoenix upward, one of the earliest of them all, our liberating, rescuing wheel.

Throughout our time on this planet, it's the things we've invented that have masked our frailty and freed us from it. Not completely, of course; we're too frail for that.

Disease and disaster still have their wicked way with us. So, for the frailties invention cannot master, we have faith and hope, prayer and drama.

Prayer is us asking for miracles. Drama gives us miracles. Not actual miracles but an illusion of miracles real enough to imagine the possibility of them coming true.

Drama is the world the way it should be, a place where prayers are answered and intent determines outcome. In drama, love does conquer all and virtue does prevail. The baddie never wins the gunfight at High Noon.

Bruce Willis doesn't Die Hard but the terrorists do. When Harry Meets Sally, we know it's going to last. Because Love, Actually does make the world go round. (Cue violins and hand out the hankies.)

We like drama for the same reason we pray. Each expresses our desire for things to happen as we wish. And each measures the gap between what we wish and what we get.

The world is an indifferent place, unfair, unreasoning, blind to our desires. Most of the time, the world's drama is petty and piffling and most of the things that exercise us daily really don't matter at all.

Worse still, virtue isn't rewarded, love doesn't conquer, the baddies do win most of the gunfights and the earth just shrugs.

Sometimes, its shrugs kill thousands of people and there is no rhyme or reason to these things or symmetry either. Try as we might, we cannot wrest the world to our will and make it what we want it to be.

Except, sometimes, once in a wonderful while, we can. And that is why the rescue in Chile captures and enthrals us. This is the real world submitting to the glorious logic of drama. This is things happening as they should because we wish it.

Initially, none of this meant much to us. If mention was made of the miners trapped in the San Jose pit, it was cursory. If we felt anything it was a faint flicker of sympathy for the families of men we didn't know.

Until those men were found alive - because those on the surface had kept looking for signs of survivors. Suddenly, anyone who's ever felt helpless and hoped for release was captured by their story and prayed it would end happily.

We're simple souls. We like happy endings. They're good. Happy endings are our revenge on heedless fate. Usually, fate prevails. But not this time.

This time, because the Copiapo miners were not only trapped in a tomb but, paradoxically, safe in a womb, and because those above them could call on all the ingenuity we've evolved and all the things we've invented, then perhaps we could hope that we would bend the world to our will and make a happy ending happen.

Little wonder the Chilean President said on Thursday, "This is a magical night. A night when life defeated death. A night when hope defeated fear. A night which made us feel more human, more alive."

It's good to feel human, better still to feel more alive. We should all do it more often. The best way to be alive is to feel more alive. Intensity is our essence. It's the nub of us.

No one watching the drama unfold on their picture machine can feel so intensely alive as those rescued miners must. Nor can we be as grateful and relieved as their families and lovers and friends. But we can share some part of those emotions and know that they make us feel more human and more alive.

"Be strong, my love. I love you," one miner wrote to his wife from deep in the earth. "I love you." That is all any of us can hope to hear. "Be strong, my love." And that is all that any of us can be, whatever hole we're in.