Our Inescapable Mortality

I recently became a father to a beautiful little girl called Sophia. She is lovely, so cute and adorable. I must confess however I did not have the smoothest and most idyllic introduction to fatherhood. This was not because anything went wrong with her delivery, nor was it because there was anything wrong Sophia. She is a perfectly healthy and normal baby.

My difficulties came with the transition into fatherhood, the occupation of this new place in my life, stepping over the line into this new epoch of my own brief existence. This event of Sophia’s birth seemed to overwhelm me and got me thinking in all sorts of unsettling ways. I must confess that my first experience when holding Sophia for the first time was not an elation and excitement at promise of new life, but weirdly enough was of the proximity of death.

I was so strongly aware, given that she was so new into the world, of the fact that the place she had come from was a complete mystery to me. In fact, where the hell did she come from, what was she before she was? The force with which I felt this question was troubling. This was because she had so recently come from a place that seems to me to be “non-being”, she came from a place in which she was nothing but a twinkle in my eye. But this must be troubling to us because this place of “non-being” is the place we all came from. It is our reality, this place of mystery out of which this new life emerged.

And this is the place to which we will return, very shortly. This place is our Alpha and our Omega, it is our true destiny and we cannot escape it. I watched my father-in-law holding Sophia and this fact struck harder than ever before. I took a picture of him holding her and that picture strongly reminded me of pictures I had seen of my grandfather holding me. In the blink of an eye I have my own daughter and my grand-father has walked into the still night. I realised that there could well be a time that Sophia will look at this very picture of her grand-father who has himself walked into the still night.

I must confess that the birth of my daughter made me feel very mortal, and I could not see beyond the fact that everyone around me is mortal. I did not see human beings with bright futures, I saw mortal beings with a singular and inescapable destiny. This was very unsettling. I don’t know if this is just par for the course but in any case it is a very significant lesson, lest we readily forget our true natures. We are not here to attain immortality and to be remembered into posterity. We are a light that flickers for a brief moment and then disappears. The flickering of our light does not serve any purpose other than the fact that it flickers. It matters not what is left behind for others to remember you by, your light will not flicker on it to appreciate it.

The light of your attention is its own point, allow yourself to savour it. Ensure that you do justice to the flickering of your light by allowing to be appreciative of the things it settles upon, let it flicker in the best of ways. Work on remembering the futility of your ends in the world. Work towards coming to terms with the truth of your nature, your nature is to walk into the still night and leave it all behind. Make peace with that and enjoy the moment, and when the night calls, go to it with peace. But if there is one thing my experience with my daughter taught me, I find that place terrifying, and I am not even sure why.