Connected

Life is a miracle, regardless of spiritual or religious beliefs. It baffles me how two cells can merge and eventually create a human life. As the cells divide and create more cells, each of them different and serving different roles that will eventually turn into the heart or the liver, I am caught off guard just how complex and beautiful that nature’s ever flowing river of creations just ended up becoming capable of creating life from so little. Bursting at the seams of these cells are the codes for an unique human being. Everything unfolds from them. Seeing the division only makes the awe even more visible.

Life is the product of biological soups that came together in just the right way and in just the right time. Evolutionary pressures took the original imprints and improvised thousands of different life forms in the process.

Death, on the other hand, reveals the limits of evolutionary miracles. For the religious or the spiritual, life goes on in the form of ethereal beings or souls that depart from the dead physical body. I know not what will happen to us when we take our last breathes. The only thing I know is that our bodies will one day return to the primordial soup of atoms and molecules, ready to be created into something new. Our skin, our hearts, our bones, our hair—all of it returns to the world from once it came from. In another life, we become other creatures or even a part of the very soil that cradles life. We become, once again, a part of the great exchange of resources. We become, through pieces decayed, a part of the whole that has existed since Time began.

Whether souls exist or not does not take away from the difficulties of goodbyes in our very human world, but I like to remember that we are already a part of something greater even as we exist right now. Everyday, our internal world exchanges with the world around us. Those who move on never truly leave us as they become apart of the wind, the water, and even a part of a new life form eventually. We’re always connected to each other in this way and our existence leaves a permanent imprint of ripples onto the surface of life that echoes forever and deep into the unknowns. No matter what happens, we are already a part of this world, engaged with each other in a multitude of possible forms. That is the beauty of life that is painted in stark contrast to the mysteries of the end.