Getting run over by a car saved my life. It happened on a late evening right in front of our apartment building. I was five years old. I don’t remember the accident. But I do remember what happened right after. The stars were burning that night. I could tell they were stars, because their light was clean and white and furious; but they were moving, shifting slightly in the sky, as though they were stumbling towards me. That’s when the pain kicked in - it felt a bit like pins and needles over every inch of my body, except the pins and needles must have been replaced with stakes and knives. Above all, though, my mind was drawn to my mom’s face, which was hovering just above my head. Her mouth was moving but I couldn’t hear anything. Suddenly, the stars tilted drunkenly above me, and something jerked in my chest. Then I was floating in the air maybe twenty feet above my body. I remained there, extremely calm, while I watched the entire scene play out. The crowd around my body split as an ambulance arrived and they strapped me to a stretcher. I closed my eyes. They took me to a hospital and I woke up a day later with no major injuries. The doctors did have something important to tell my mother, though: I was almost completely deaf. I think she had suspected it too, during the accident. She told me that she had been yelling at me to move out of the way as my dad, still in the car, reversed direction, and unknowingly ran me over. I hadn’t heard her. When surgery later restored my hearing, it changed my life. It seemed like a literal miracle that one day I heard nothing, and the next day the world erupted into birdsong and chatter. Being able to hear was a large miracle, but there were smaller miracles on the way too. The kindness of the nurses, who would wordlessly sit on my bed and play me cartoons to keep me happy. The kindness of my family, who were there with me every step of the way. And the kindness of every stranger who encouraged my initial, incomprehensible attempts at speech. And once I knew that miracles were real, I fell in love with them. Now, I try to pay the world back with my own sort of miracles. I volunteer with hospice patients, keeping them company in their last moments of life. Every moment I spend volunteering is alight with poignancy, the precious feeling that comes when you are suffused with joy and its impending end at the same time. I have founded several nonprofit organizations that provide free education and healthcare to over a million people. I invent medical devices that help people undergo surgery as I once did. But it is about more than paying a debt. It is about moving the world forward. If we do not help each other, we all become mired in endless cycles of tedious pain. Suffering does not have a reason. But what is true is that we are all united in this suffering, in the fact of being with each other through this lifetime. In the fact of sharing this beautiful world. Suffering does not have a reason, but it can have a meaning. We must help each other so that we can transform pain into miracles. Through the darkest nights shines the most brilliant light.