Rebirth

The worst day of my mother's life was the day I was born. How do I know this? Quite simply, because she tells me in these exact words every year on my birthday. It's not because something's wrong with our relationship; it's because of the process she had to go through to bring me into this world. Childbirth is notoriously painful, and apparently I was determined to make it especially hard on my mother, who was trying her best to have a natural birth. I was not properly positioned, and I had grown to 11 lbs. For those of you unfamiliar with prenatal positioning, when it is improper, it can complicate any birth by increasing the medical risk. Yikes! With that context, it's easy to imagine how that memory came to live on as the worst in my mother's personal history.

What is lesser discussed is how traumatic the process is for the baby being born. Most of us don't think about the physical and psychological trauma that newborns have to go through to join the rest of us on this Earth. Perhaps it is because they do not have the capacity to speak for themselves, or because no one remembers their first year of life. Nonetheless, the birthing process is just as traumatic for the child as it is for the mother. Their soft bones are forced through a tiny portal that squeezes them violently. Their comfortable environment is disrupted as they emerge from fluid to air into a room full of strangers. Maybe they are wrangled out using forceps, vacuum suction, or caesarean section. As an aside, if you've never seen a video of a caesarean section and you're considering an elective one, it is worth watching so you can make an informed decision. They forcibly pull on the baby's head to remove him from his mother. The event of childbirth is not calm. It is labor-intensive and traumatic.

And yet, we think of birth as something to be celebrated. It is something to be celebrated. A new life has emerged with limitless potential. But, who is to say that any life has less than infinitie potential? This begs the question, how does one unlock infinite potential? I'll tell you, step-by-step. The first step is to experience birth. The second step is to take a leap of faith. The third step is to be present throughout the journey. The fourth step is to recognize when a chapter has come to an end. The fifth step is to learn from the experience. The final step is to start over again.

These series of rebirths, much like our initial birth, are not meant to be comfortable. They are meant to disrupt our realities and teach us lessons which guide us through life. They require us to experience excruciating growing pains, over and over again. Maybe a change of heart, maybe some goodbyes. The thing about infinite potential is that we are not able to access it all at once, and we can never access all of it. By its very definition, if any one of us could access the entirety of our infinite potential, at that exact moment, it would cease to be infinite. But we can always, always start over.

The difference between birth and rebirth is the element of choice. We have agency in rebirth. We are not required to disrupt our lives. We are not required to take a leap of faith. It is easy to stay comfortable, and there is nothing wrong with that. But for those of us now frightened by the comfort, or for those of us who entered into a commitment knowing the end date from the start, rebirth is necessary in spite of the pain.