Life begins when you start to pay attention to your life. I find it interesting that I was made to look at my life at an early age. My family did not have hardships I was aware of and I did not have bullies in the school constantly on my back like kids do today. I was in Mrs. Upchurch’s kindergarten class and I had a hard time adjusting to kids I did not know because they grew up on the other side of the neighborhood rec center and they mush have gone to the same pre-school. To make a long story short, a model student I was not. Then some point in that school year, my whole life began, not just an average student bringing up grades kind of change, but I had an actual “your life starts now” change. Now my life beginning was not a father-son talk, or a mom pleading her heart, or a Sunday school lesson (I never paid attention in church like I do now); Michael Jackson came out with the song Man In The Mirror and that is when it happened-like Neo being in the hallway and he is seeing the world as it really is.
Now being a kindergarten student I did not understand the whole meaning of the song like I do now but since my parent and sister read to me often and there was always music plying in the house I got the gist of the song. I have to credit Divine Intervention because the first time I heard this song was actually the music video. These powerful images of starving children, powerful leaders, racist crimes, etc. along with Michael’s voice singing, “make a change” almost in a pleading way made me feel like he was talking to me. After that song was over, I became “aware” of a world much larger than Gresham Park and the neighborhoods where both of my grandmas lived. Maybe I still cannot put it in the best words but somehow I felt I needed to help change the world but I had to become a better person to do it. That is when live begins: I mean the scientific and religious communities clash on if it begins at conception or this many months or that many months or what is the definition of life (side note: on that debate, just ask me and I will tell you my view); but on a philosophical level if I may interject, life starts when you become aware of something bigger than your life.
When you are able to connect to a larger world and ask, the JFK question, “what can you do for your country?” That is what life is all about right-my service to you and your service to me-the Golden Rule. As an older man, well still young man I should say, I think about my life and what it will say when it is over. I started reading a book, Finishing Well: The Adventure of Life Beyond Halftime by Bob Buford, and it is essentially for people retiring but I kept reading it anyway. Again, I have new perspective on where life begins and it all ends up back to where I was before the new me walked into Mrs. Upchurch’s kindergarten class (in which I was awarded “Most Dependable” just to pat myself on the back); that is to make a difference in the world you have to make a difference within yourself first. That difference is, that life is not about you, it is about everyone who is your neighbor and for you to be the Good Samaritan.
Now, I do not want this to be out of context that we are cogs in a machine to just turn and turn because that is just waiting to die, not living. We should live but not be selfish with our living because there are so many who are spokes on a wheel, whose life has not started and are just going down an escalator like storm trooper in Robot Chicken, greeting their evil ruler with the programmed greeting, “my lord!” Okay, I am rambling a bit here but my point is, our lives start when we realize, God made this earth one big living organism and we are cells in it to keep it alive and moving and beautiful and not as a clock that has us as transistors. Life begins when we realize all life needs us to start living-living for a purpose.
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