A New Beginning - By Edil Rentas Casiano

A New Beginning 

Today we went to the hospital to see our son, just as we have been doing for the last three weeks. We arrived mid-afternoon, left the car with the valet parking attendant, said our usual hellos, and proceeded to the reception desk where we checked in.

We continued on to the elevator. When the door opened, a hospital volunteer pushed a wheelchair with a lady holding a tiny newborn close to her chest. "Congratulations!" I said. "Thank you!" was heard multiple times like an echo as the various family members followed with armfuls of flowers, gifts, and bags. The smiles on everyone's faces spoke of the happiness that filled their hearts. "A new beginning!" I said in my mind. "The beginning of a new season in those people's lives," I commented to my wife Lucy.

A new beginning. When one thinks about it, about a new beginning, yes, something is beginning at the moment this newborn heads out of the hospital, but is it really the beginning?

Thinking a bit about it, there have been many beginnings leading to this moment. Where exactly can one say that this moment began? For believers, they may say that it was the moment God wrote this new life's existence in the book of life. This, however, is a complex and compounding answer. This would mean that every soul, and every life, connected to every single ancestor on both sides of the family had to be established, one by one, until the day this baby was conceived. That's a long, long chain of events, occurring in perfect synchronization, maybe beginning in the Byzantine Empire, or who knows if even in times before the birth of Jesus.

But wait. Was the beginning of this life, as we know it, the moment the egg was fertilized? Or was it the moment the heart was formed and started beating? Even if we accept either one of these as the beginning, let's not forget that this life follows dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of preceding newborns that have followed a similar path. The reality of it is that life's beginning is a complex series of events, in a game of probabilities that's just mind-boggling. If you were to change just one event out of the likely thousands that led to this moment, this moment wouldn't be happening.

Yet, even if one event was changed, it is very likely that we would still have landed in this very moment, if, as some people say, everything in life is predetermined. As I write this, however—which I started writing with one subject in mind but then headed in another direction—the more I think about it, the more convoluted it gets.

After the idea came to my mind and thoughts started flowing, I just can't stop thinking about where exactly it began. Well, a simpler answer may be the moment the baby came out of the womb. Right? Well, that's too simplistic since we already know that there were many beginnings before this one. We also know that this is just one of the many new beginnings this new life will go through during his or her existence.

This life's beginning: the instance in which a moment of love resulted in a race of millions of sperm, against all odds, for a lucky swimmer to break through a wall, which instantly closed the gates for all the others. But what if two, or three, or four, or eight broke through at the same time? Was that exactly the way it was supposed to happen? The answer is yes, because it obviously happened, right?

Then, all this is followed by birth, new beginnings at home, at pre-kindergarten, kindergarten, elementary school, as a teenager, junior high, high school, college, adult life, courtships, marriage, and so on.

But who's to say at what moment any one event, or beginning, gets changed or even interrupted because of what we consider a premature passing to its next destination, whatever that would be? Would it be heaven? Maybe hell. Or purgatory for those who believe in that. Or will it be the beginning of another life as someone else, in another dimension, as others believe?

The mind-bending part of this bunch of thoughts I'm laying down for you to ponder is that the line of events that represents "life" is different for every single person on this planet, past, present, and future, for hundreds, thousands, or maybe even millions of years. After all, we cannot put a finger on which moment the very first life emerged that started the whole cycle of civilization, which eventually led to this newborn's beginning.

If we are believers of the scriptures, that moment began with God's creation of Earth. Or maybe it was when God had the idea to create Earth, or Adam, or Eve? And if so, how did we end up with millions of inhabitants beginning with just two people? I'd rather not think about it, as this would imply that some not-so-acceptable events (according to today's standards) had to take place. What was God thinking?

If you have read this far, please forgive me. It's not my intention to question God, the scriptures, nor to be disrespectful to anyone. It's just that the idea of the beginning of life is a complicated subject, to the point that it gives validity to the question of what came first, the chicken or the egg? In any case, in the end, it is not just another beginning. It is a new beginning of a new life, which begins wherever you want the beginning to be.

Edil Rentas Casiano