For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World - Hardcover

chapter one

Birth

Yesterday a drop of semen, tomorrow a handful of [. . .] ashes.

-Marcus Aurelius

After our daughter was born, Jon and I said to each other a thousand times day, "I can't believe she's here!" "I can't believe we have a kid!" "I can't believe we made a person!" Every day for months and months we said it out loud as if we were just discovering how reproduction worked. We struggled to wrap our minds around it. I actually don't suppose I'll ever truly get over this idea. My mother never has. She sometimes still joyfully says to my brother Sam and me, "You don't understand, you didn't exist, and then we made you! And now you're here!" We roll our eyes and say, "Yes, Mom, that's how it works." Which is true, but no less astonishing, beautiful, or thrilling. Being born at all is amazing. It's easy to lose sight of this. But when a baby comes into the world, when a new human appears from inside of another, in the accompanying rush of emotion, we experience a little bit of the immense brazen beauty of life.

Rituals are, among other things, tools that help us process change. There is so much change in this universe. So many entrances and exits, and ways to mark them, each one astonishing in its own way. Even if we don't see birth or life as a miracle in the theological sense, it's still breathtakingly worthy of celebration.

Typing these words, I am, like you, experiencing the brief moment between birth and death. It's brief compared to what's on either side. For all we know, there was, arguably, an infinite amount of time before you or I was born. Our current understanding is that the big bang gave birth to the universe as we know it about 13.8 billion years ago. But the big bang may or may not be the beginning of everything. What came before, if anything, remains an unsolved mystery to our species. As we humans learn, create better technology, and produce more brilliant people, we might discover that which we currently think happened is wrong. But somehow, something started us off a very long time ago.

In the other direction there will, theoretically, be an infinite amount of time after we're dead. Not infinite for our planet or our species, but maybe for the universe. Maybe not. We don't know much about what that will entail except that the star we orbit will eventually burn out. Between those two enormous mysteries, if we're lucky, we get eighty or one hundred years. The blink of an eye, really, in the grand scheme of things. And yet here we are. Right now.

It's easy to forget how amazing this is. Days and weeks go by and the regularity of existing eclipses the miraculousness of it. But there are certain moments when we manage to be viscerally aware of being alive. Sometimes those are very scary moments, like narrowly avoiding a car accident. Sometimes they are beautiful, like holding your newborn in your arms. And then there are the quiet moments in between, when all the joy and sorrow seem profound only to you.

On one particular day a few winters ago I felt this intensely. I had just found out that I was pregnant, full of wonder and nausea. Everything was about to change forever. It was also the twentieth anniversary of my father's death. Twenty years feels like a shockingly long time. It's significantly longer than the time I had with him. I miss him very much. Sometimes, still now, so much that it feels intolerable.

Feeling the entrance of one new being and the loss of another brought on a series of paradoxical emotions, and a powerful sense of my place in the universe. I remember walking around the city, stunned that everyone I saw, the owner of every wise and wizened face, was once a baby. This seemed revelatory, despite its obviousness. I couldn't help reflecting on how any of us got here in the first place. Human beings do not go back to the beginning of this universe. In our present configuration we've only been around about a few hundred thousand years-the number changes as we uncover more of our fossilized ancestors-but the planet we live on is more than 4.5 billion years old. We're new here. We evolved from slightly different creatures who evolved from somebody else and so on back to one-cell organisms that we would not recognize as our relatives, but nonetheless, they are. How those one-celled forebears came to be is just now beginning to become clear. Even less clear is how exactly it will end for us: we will either destroy ourselves, be destroyed by an outside event, or evolve into something unrecognizable.

As the small creature inside me expanded my midsection, I was reminded of how many pregnant girlfriends over the years have looked at me with a kind of mild, jokey horror and exclaimed, "It's like there's an alien inside me!"

My dad spent a lot of time thinking about aliens, trying to determine if they existed. He never found out, because so far there's no evidence we've ever had contact with life from elsewhere in the universe. For my dad, as for me, belief required evidence. To say "I don't believe" in something doesn't mean that I am certain it doesn't exist. Just that I have seen no proof that it does, so I am withholding belief. That's how I think about a lot of elements of religion, like God or an afterlife. And it's the same way my dad thought about aliens. As he once said, "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." We don't have proof, so we don't know. And yet we all seem to have a vivid idea of what an alien is like. We almost always imagine they look like us but they're smaller. They have large eyes and no hair. They don't talk. They don't know the social mores. They might be good or they might be evil, but they definitely want something from us and as soon as they arrive, everything will be different forever.

Babies are not like aliens. Our idea of aliens is like our idea of babies.

Maybe that's part of what my dad was thinking when I arrived. My mother tells me that when I was born, my father lifted me up, looked at me, and said, "Welcome to the planet Earth."

Then they didn't name me for three days.

When they finally did, I got the middle name Rachel, for my dad's mom. She was both magnetic and impossible, a mesmerizing storyteller with a one-of-a-kind laugh. She had a very difficult childhood. Her mother died in childbirth when Rachel was two. Her father (who may or may not have come to America to escape a murder rap in Russia) sent her back to Europe to live with aunts she had never met until he remarried a few years later. But Rachel grew up in New York, found true love with my grandfather Sam, and in many ways made my father who he was. It's a complicated legacy.

When I was a small girl, family members were often astonished, alarmed even, at how clearly my mannerisms resembled hers. It was not learned behavior. I was born close to nine months to the day after her death. My parents would get chills at the sound of Rachel's distinctive laugh emerging from their little daughter. It was "very eerie," I was told. It would have been easy for me to make a leap from these reactions to something ominous, something scary. I might have guessed that I was possessed by my dead grandmother, or that she was somehow haunting me.

When I was eight, my younger brother was born, and named for our grandfather Sam. Soon he bore such a resemblance to our father that, when invitations to my dad's birthday party went out with a black-and-white picture of him a little boy swimming off Coney Island, people called to say, "Yes, we can come to the party, but why is there a picture of Sam on the invitation?" To my parents these family resemblances were something wondrous.

My parents told me that there was a kind of secret code called DNA running through our veins. I learned it carried the traits of ancestors I would never meet. My genes linked me back to the earliest humans, to prehistoric mammals and back eventually to the first life on Earth. And if, someday, I had children of my own, I would become a link in the chain, passing along an embedded part of myself to the future generations who would never know my name. This was, to me, more satisfying than any other possible explanation. And it was verifiable, independent of my belief or lack thereof.

This was my introduction to a world of giddy enthusiasm about the fact that the universe is bigger than we are currently able to comprehend, that we live on a planet we are perfectly adapted for, that we are capable of critical thought, and that our understanding of all this grows deeper and more astonishing with time. And that, as far as we can tell, this all happened by chance. Think of the asteroid that could have just missed the Earth, sparing the dinosaurs, robbing those little Cretaceous mammals of the chance to flourish and eventually evolve into you and me. I find it impossible not to think of this as miraculous, despite the connotations.

Even with our species flourishing, the chances of any one of us being born are still remote. Think of all the slight variations in human migration patterns, for example, that could have kept your great-great-grandparents from ever crossing paths. If you have any European ancestry, someone in your lineage had to survive the black death in the fourteenth century, which killed more than half the people on the continent. If you have any Native American heritage, somehow your forebears managed to pass their genes on to you, despite the fact that only 10 or 20 percent survived the microbes and violence brought by European invaders. Whatever your ancestry, the list of wars, raids, plagues, famines, and droughts your genetic material had to overcome is stunning. All this in order to arrive at the moment where you, exactly you, are ready to depart your mother's womb and come into the great wide world.

Let's say there were three decisive moments in each of your biological parents' lives that led to their meeting. This is a ridiculously conservative estimate; it's probably millions of moments, but, for simplicity's sake, let's say three. Your mother chose to go to such-and-such university, she chose to strike up a friendship with so-and-so, and years later, she chose to accept so-and-so's invitation to the party where she met your dad. Meanwhile, your dad chose X career, where he met X colleague, and eventually accepted the invitation to the party where he meets your mom.

At the risk of stating the obvious, in order for your parents to meet, they each had to be born, which required both sets of their parents to meet. And before that, your grandparents had to be born, so your great-grandparents had to meet. And so on and so on, all the way back to the first humans in East Africa.

Right now we think there have been approximately 7,500 generations of Homo sapiens. They all had to find each other in that perfect moment. There are so many forks in the road that within ten or fifteen generations the odds become mind-boggling.

But we've only accounted for conscious decisions. What about happenstance?

My mother's parents met on the New York City subway. In a car of the E train during rush hour. It was 1938. My granddad Harry was reading William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and when he went to turn the page my grandmother Pearl put her hand on his and said she wasn't finished reading. How many different cars were on that train? How many different trains came through that station? How many different train lines could they each have lived on? How many different cities could their parents have emigrated to? And so on and so on back for all of history.

It's true that the vast majority of unions that led to any of us, were not rom-com-worthy meet-cutes. Many were terrifying wedding nights, a stranger at the right time or place, a warm body in the cold, lonely darkness, and unspeakable horrors at the hands of invaders and enslavers. But there were, undoubtedly, also some unions formed in the glorious rapture of true love.

For every single woman who led to you, there would have been a moment of clarity. Her period wouldn't come. Instead maybe nausea and sore breasts. Soon, her body would start to change, her growing belly a badge of pride or shame. Sometimes I imagine all the inner thoughts of these women, their excitement and fear. Thousands of stories of passion and pain, ecstasy and agony, all but a few lost to the ages, but all equally critical to you being born, to you being genetically who you are.

On the other hand, if you believe in destiny or determinism, you believe that only one event had to happen: the universe had to start. Everything after that is, was, and will be inescapable. Including you reading this sentence. Or you might believe some events are inescapable and others are not. The ideas that "everything happens for a reason" or that certain things are "meant to be" are often offered as reassurances. But, to me, they are not as astounding or awe-inspiring as the idea that, in all this chaos, somehow you are you.

You do not need to formulate an opinion on the nature of free will and fate to know being born is profoundly special. The arrival of a baby is a cause for celebration all over the world: baptisms, baby namings, circumcisions, ear piercings, or other kinds of ritual scarification are popular to mark the occasion. Umbilical cords and placentas get incorporated into an array of traditions. Sometimes the welcoming ritual is a tiny private act. For example, among Hindus and Muslims there is a belief that a baby's first taste should be sweet-a drop of honey or a piece of fruit is used to introduce new taste buds to the world-and that a sacred prayer should be the first thing they hear. Sometimes it's a feast once you've settled into life on Earth, as it was for ancient Incan babies upon being weaned and for generations of Chinese babies when they reach one hundred days of life, a great accomplishment during the eons when infant mortality rates were high. Now it's a reminder of how entwined birth and death can be.