Do you remember your first thought?
I have a memory that has stuck with me since I had it even though I don't know exactly when it occurred.
I remember looking around a room. It was in a kitchen large enough to have a small table where my Mom, my grandmother, and another woman sat drinking coffee. The kitchen was dark and it smelled old and as this was fifty years ago, the decor looked like something even then you'd only see on an old TV show.
As the women talked and talked, I looked around. The house was on a hill and I looked through the window to see sunlight. In the sunlight I remember seeing hills and trees and flowers. As I watched, I remember feeling like I'd woken up from a dream but as it had never woken up before, I remember being excited. One second I didn't know I existed and the next second I did.
I could vaguely understand what the women were saying. Our family was about to move. My Mom was visiting people in the neighborhood and saying goodbye. I tried to respond but they couldn't understand me. It made me angry and I began to cry.
My crying caused my Mom to pick me up and that's when the memory ends. After that all is lost in the millions of other memories I've forgotten over the years.
But this one stuck because it was so vivid. When I got older I tried to explain it to my Mom. I described the kitchen in as perfect a detail as i could remember hoping to figure out the identity of the other person. The refrigerator and stove were an ugly eggshell blue you now see on antiques from the 1950s but honestly that could have been imperfect memory gotten from my TV watching. The feeling of waking up was definitely real.
I've relayed this memory to my Mom a couple of times but she smiled when I told her. I was only two-years-old when we moved. She said I was too young to remember. I swear it was different. I remember seeing green grass and there was none where we moved.
That feeling stayed with me. I remembered it after we moved and I remember it now.
I think of that day a lot. It reminds me of that moment when things went from all confusion to an understanding of being alive. To me, that's the point when humanity begins. Everything up to that point, humans are no different than cows or chicken or dogs. Everything is instinct. After that, we are alone in the ability to be self-aware (as far as we know - perhaps my dog is as frustrated as I was back then with my inability to speak and be understood).
When people talk about souls or the spark of life, I think about that moment. I went from a passive observer to active participant. The passive world isn't far away, we return to the every night when we close our eyes and go to sleep.
It also makes me wonder about death. At some point we all close our eyes and that spark goes out. Christians believe your soul leaves your body and ascends to a different plane of existence. That's a nice thought but I find it hard to believe.
Instead, I think we close our eyes and return to sleep.
I'll grant you, the thought of eternal slumber isn't as nice as a heaven but I don't find it scary. We weren't scared when woke and we shouldn't be when we return to slumber. It's all just part of the unending cycle of the universe. It reminds me of a song from the Byrds, here's the first verse:
To everything (turn, turn, turn)
There is a season (turn, turn, turn)
And a time to every purpose, under heaven
A time to be born, a time to die
A time to plant, a time to reap
A time to kill, a time to heal
A time to laugh, a time to weep
Almost every word of this song comes from Ecclesiastes 3:1-8. It's a nice thought and it's things like this I think about when people, like those in the atheist community, bash the Bible for being irrelevant in today's society. Like the song says, there is a season for every purpose and even non-believers like me can get something from its words.
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