We are our histories

Anyone who has been in the proximity of a newly born child—whether mother, father, sibling or simply through the grace of good fortune—will have felt a profound delight.

It engenders in all but the most finally broken person a sense of wonder at the fragility of life and the power of its emergence. It’s easy to forget how unlikely our existence is. We are the entirety of evolution contained. From a single cell, dividing and morphing into something more, we carry our histories.

How does this experience not drive every decision we make as adults? How is it that we endlessly act in ways which clearly aren’t in the best interests of those who will carry on?

There is nuance to every consideration, there are rarely solutions that fit all concerns. The best decision for you may not be the best decision for me. But there are some things we can agree on. Don’t do harm to the child, don’t endanger tomorrow.

So, how do you get there? How do you get to the place in your life where, if you’re in a position to make decisions, you can make decisions that are based on nothing that’s tangible, that is without reason, even arbitrary?

We are in the age of excuses. We are in the age of painting whatever colours we want onto the canvas without regard to any real meaning. But there is meaning. There does exist meaning.

The child is born without regard for our concerns politically, our concerns metaphysically, our concerns personally. There’s simply the emerging into existence of something that needs to be nurtured, that needs to be assured that somebody, something, has their best interests as an imperative. That this reality they have been born into is not looking to consume them. That there is meaning.

It seems this dividing and morphing is in the pursuit of being part of something greater, why would we imagine that the rest of our lives would be any less so?

Does this create value for that child? The only question that should matter to a parent. It should also be the basic foundation of all decisions made anywhere, anytime, by anyone.

In that moment of birth, we introduce the child into the concept of others, that there are others. And we need to do it with an awareness that there are many different opinions, many ways of being.

There is no agreed upon norm, and that’s okay. It’s a reality that needs to be traversed. It needs to be considered with as open a mind as possible. But on all sides considered. For every opinion, for every way of being, there are proponents who refuse to acknowledge that there’s anything else. And they are, often, the ones making the most noise.

Why is that? Why are the most ignorant messages on all sides being amplified? Why? Accepting the seep of ignorance does not make it absolute. From the moment the child enters the world, the only thing that’s absolute is change. Things will always be becoming something other, something different, occasionally more, occasionally less, than they were before.

Brought shockingly to the light. The child has no idea why, has no idea of anything. Not willfully ignorant, only not yet formed.

But it is ignorance that is crippling us. And it’s not ignorance of what you believe or ignorance of what I believe. It’s ignorance of the fact that there are multiple views that can be clothed as facts, as reality. Sometimes it’s simply because we’re not sure what reality is, other times it’s because somehow something foolish has grown enough to be agreed into truth.

We are blanketed with ignorance of the truth. There can be other opinions, other ways, this is a truth we have ignored. Once we accept that we’re not going to always agree, that there are different means of existing, then we can work towards finding common ground.

That’s becoming lost now, common ground. The ground upon which the child is born.

It is on common ground we exist, literally. Is that not what every one of those children born needs to feel; to know that we are together, carrying our histories forward, each of us, dividing and morphing into the whole.

Act I, Scene I — Lizard Brain

The Others

I was there from the beginning, or so I’m told.

We meet others

I was floating unaware.

I had no idea about these others. Where there was nothing, now there is much. All I know is that my circumstances have been rapidly, permanently, changed. I can’t tell you what it feels like, I can’t tell you anything. Awareness is not for the timid.

I was warm and easy, without fear. In the beginning, there was an awakening of the sense of something other. I was something other, that was my first understanding.

I was unaware that I was floating.

From parts unknown

At birth the tone is set for the rest of your life, the rest of our lives. This first startling introducing of change. Many will spend the rest of their lives trying to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Our first awareness is an awakening to the fact, a truth — we are not alone.

Out into lights, energy and interaction. It’s no wonder the senses of a human baby grow so slowly, if they didn’t, it would be a horror of disconnection. From nothing to everything in a moment.

Imagine the shock of this. It seems likely we don’t form memories from birth as a mechanism to avoid going immediately insane. How could you process all that data? Dormant in the child is the ability to understand much, but not at once.

So, slowly, begins our understandings of others, that we aren’t alone. That something external to us exists. That we are external to something other.

This first change we meet is so vast it can’t be considered, it just is. For many years, change will be relative, not recognized as anything. Just being. It couldn’t be otherwise, for many years it remains too much to consider.

At some point we all come to understand that this other is change, that we are now alive, and we will carry this change until we are no longer aware. Change is absolute, with or without our agreement. It can only be embraced.

The moment of emerging into the light; there you begin a process of accepting this change and working within it and with it. Maybe we fight it in the beginning, probably. It would be a reasonable response. But we are made of change, it’s our foundation, so it becomes our reality.

I think a strong argument can be made that we will never know our origins, that we are not meant to process what was before this awareness, and that we are not meant to know what is beyond this awareness.

We find ourselves in this other, and whatever experience was before it certainly wasn’t what we know as human. In the beginning we were not existing as we know it, then we were existing wholly internally, and finally existing also within this other. So we know we change and we know we are not alone.

We are, together, the entirety of the existing universe, it’s beginning, middle and end, in our own experience of awareness. A continuum of change, shifting endlessly between this awareness and the next.

We may not know what was before awareness, we may not see beyond awareness, yet we are aware. Change is the method by which we measure awareness. It is within the gift of existence that we change.