A newborn baby is about 25 billion times bigger at birth than it was at conception. That incredible growth occurs in just nine months. If an adult did that, his head would be among the moon and stars by the end.

Nothing should grow that quickly, yet it happens with every baby. Every time. And, somehow, all those multiplying cells align themselves, plugging into the right places to form a tiny, pumping heart, brain, eyes, kidneys, hands, feet, and all the rest. That’s how we all begin. Impossibly.

And then we come out into the golden light of day, into the golden embraces of our mothers. What a shock that must be – to go from the warm underwater existence in the womb, a cocoon of quiet peace, where the baby hears the mother’s muted voice and laugh, indistinct, yet intimate, vibrating through the waters where time has no meaning – out into the cold dry air and a world so much impossibly bigger than anything the baby has ever known. No wonder babies cry at first. Even though it’s scary, this transition is a marked improvement. Now the baby can see her parents’ faces. Now she can touch them. Now she launches out on a new sea.

Mercifully, the growth rate outside the womb is far less than inside. Still, the rapid transformation from baby to toddler to child to teenager to adult staggers the mind. The transformations wrought by the years are a mystery. Any parent who looks at his child today will see the baby she was and wonder how so much about her can be different and yet so much the same. There’s a stirring in every life that the mind struggles to grasp, a constant change … yet a constant sameness.

But as much as the body grows, the heart and soul grow even more – from the first dim perceptions the baby has as she comes to know her mother’s love, to the full awareness of the adult whose face has been deeply lined by smiles and tears.

As the child becomes an adult, she sees internal and external horizons spread out before her – so much to see, feel, do … so much to be. She will have her first stuffed animal that she clutches in bed, resting her heart on a bit of artificial fur. She will have a favorite book that she’ll want to read again and again and which will give her the first inklings of the world beyond her home. She will have her first embarrassment, burying her head in her mother’s legs and her first scare that makes her reach for her father’s arms. She will have her first day of school wearing a tiny backpack loaded with books. She will make her first friends and have her first arguments with them. She will want to be like other girls – or she will not – and she will find both desires painful.

Little by little, her sense of herself will grow. Unexpected moments and memories will implant themselves in her mind and heart, leaving a long afterglow all her days: a walk through silent snowy woods at night; a late-night conversation with a sister; leaves falling around her like a golden rain; a book or film that moves her for reasons she can’t explain; the frosty frothing waves on a beach at sunrise; an epiphany in one of her classes; a friend who lets her down, and another who doesn’t.

She will break her heart over a thousand little things, and a few big ones. Some wounds will heal, some will not.

She will have her first crush and her first kiss. She will give her heart away to another frail, impossible, hopeful, beautiful heart, risking everything on a vow. And together they’ll have a baby daughter, and they’ll stare wonderingly into her newly opened eyes. And the story will begin all over.

When she gets to the end of it all, her cup – it is to be hoped – will be brimming full, and in her old age, puttering around her house, waiting for the grandchildren’s next visit, she will remember and reminisce and contemplate, steeping all her experiences long and well like a rich aromatic tea, and she’ll draw some measure of wisdom from it all, even the bits she still can’t explain. Sometimes, dozing in her chair, she’ll slip out of time for a moment and think she’s a young woman again, seeing her husband for the first time, or holding her first child. The face or laugh of someone long gone will flit across her mind so that she sits up, startled. The dog will come over to her, thumping his tail in the quiet room, and she’ll run her papery hand over his glossy fur.

This is the stuff of a life: uncountable moments, fragments of experience, trends and stages, that somehow form a coherent – though mysterious – whole. Each journey of a life is unrepeatable, the world inside each heart irreplaceable.

How is it that we’re bored? That we find life uninteresting?

We forget how unaccountable, mysterious, and painfully glorious it all is, this world and our presence in it. We’re like people yawning at a supernova.

I can understand sorrow in life. But I can’t understand boredom or indifference. Every life is a gift. Every life is impossible.

This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal, a project of 1819 News. 

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