Magique Publishing

Hello there!

I would like to take a moment and share some little thoughts with you that have been troubling me lately. For some reason, in a moment of melancholy, I thought the other day of the saying about how we all are born alone, we live alone, and we die alone. I don’t exactly know the saying itself, or whom to attribute it to, but it’s something I’ve heard several times in life.

After some initial sadness, it struck me that this saying, and the philosophy behind it, is really quite wrong, or at the very least … oblivious to the realities of life.

As far as I know, we are never born alone. Quite literally, there is usually at least one other person there: the person giving birth. Now, humans are not mushrooms. We do not begin as a spore that is launched into the air to fend for itself. Wheee, off the spore goes, with the mushroom not caring where it lands! Imagine that. But no. Human babies are ridiculously intense in their arrival, and intense in their neediness after their arrival. We literally can not survive on our own for quite some time. 

Life then, after birth, sees us elaborately entwined with other humans. Communities is how we survive as a species. 

But what of the death? Sure, perhaps we are born with other humans around us. And when we live, our lives are interwoven. But surely, we die alone? Well yes, sometimes we do. But sometimes we don’t. 

Now, after some more thoughts, one could say that the whole point of the saying is that ‘we are the only one on our journey’. To which I would argue that yes, we may be doing our ‘own thing’ in some sense or other, but I do not think that qualifies as being ‘alone’.

We may be lonely. We may feel isolated. But I believe that we are born into community, we thrive within community, and we pass on to more community. In the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh, (I can’t quite remember exactly where he said this) there was the notion of each person being a drop of water flung up from an ocean wave. We live our life flung up, seemingly alone but really it is just a little cycle before we immerse back down into the communion of the ocean. So yes, I do believe we travel in community with our other water siblings, and then we descend back into the ocean.

 And those are my little thoughts on the matter. I hope it brought you some solace, or at the very least made you smile and go ‘hmmm’ a little. 🙂 Have a wonderful day!