Life, After All

Excerpt from Russell’s Journal
09/01/1988

Upon the birth of a new cousin

So young, barely more than 24 hours old
Pink, soft skin
Wrapped in a blanket with alphabet blocks and
Bears on it
Fragile but very alive, though sleeping
Red-brown hair at the back of her head,
Thinning toward the front

It’s hard to believe that this baby has only breathed our air for a little over a day. Everything about her is new and generative, unlike my body which began its deterioration years ago according to scientists that study such things. They say that after the age of 14 or so, the human body begins to slowly succumb — cells don’t regenerate as quickly and therefore the whole body is already beginning to decay. It’s rather depressing I suppose, but this baby is new in every sense of the word. And so fragile by the standards of our hard world of concrete and steel. What else can you say about such a tiny, helpless thing? Fragile — it seems so trite and yet it’s definitely true. Jessica Leigh, although she doesn’t know yet that is who she will be for the next 80 years or so, squirms a little, clutches her blanket, and then lies still again. Even while sleeping, she radiates the presence of warm, human life, and when she makes a sound, she will command more attention than any adult can hope for.

Human life isn’t something most people spend a lot of time thinking about. We all have things to get done in a day that occupy our thoughts, most people don’t just sit around meditating on something, anything not part of the daily grind, although they should. How can the mind keep from becoming stagnant if it never has the opportunity to ponder a rose, a shape in the clouds, or a spiderweb in the grass? And yet does the average person take a few spare moments to do this, to simply stop and realize that there are hundreds of lifeforms on and around them, that tachyons and neutrinos are zinging painlessly through their bodies by the millions, that a thousand bolts of lightning strike the earth every second, that their bodies are 93% water, or that trees are falling in a forest where no one is near and therefore, theoretically, may not exist? Of course not. It’s the same with being alive — we take it entirely for granted, although it may end at any moment as suddenly as this period.

Imagine how much more meaningful everyday existence would become if we were to just stop and, no matter how tired or hurried, remember that it is life, after all.