Life is a struggle. In order to move forward, you must fight. The bell will not ring for the end of the round. The match is everlasting. The prize: Your conscience.

Does anyone truly remember the day of their birth? At some point each one of us became sentient. To pinpoint the moment when you became self-aware would be uncanny.  Life does not work that way.  Nevertheless, there was a moment when we became truly human.  The question is not about the primal instinct to breathe, eat, and defecate, but rather about consciousness.  Why are we conscious? More importantly, why do we have a drive to be moral?

I was born a child in need. Ten-weeks premature and breathing fluid, my heart beat out every rhythm as if it was its last.  This is how the myth was passed down to me:

My twenty-year-old mother entered the hospital in great distress.  She had been told during her pregnancy that she should take hot baths to ease her cramps.  She was at work when the pain started. Having had a jaundiced daughter 18 months before, she knew that it was time. The doctors told her that I would have to be a C-section.  I was soon carved out of her as expertly as the 80s would allow.  I was soon in an incubator, fragile and grasping for a future.

That is when the miracle happened.

As I lay just beyond the reach of Death, my family gathered good people together to weep and pray over me.  The fluid in my lungs was drained. My heart strengthened.  From then on I began to steadily improve.  I was taught that it was nothing less than an holy intervention: That the hand of God had saved me. While I lay there innocently, other infants weren’t so lucky. My mother once told me that she would never forget seeing another young woman cradling her lifeless child in a rocking chair in the neonatal ICU, sobbing uncontrollably.

Blissfully unaware of such tragedy, I was taken home several weeks later.  My father said I was so small that they had to find doll’s clothing for me to wear.  He was able to hold me with two cupped hands.  How I grew up to be a six foot tall firebrand is beyond me.

So, why mention all of this? Why speak of the forlorn ghosts of the past?  Well, this story has stuck with me for all my life. I’ve grown into a deeply philosophical man.  At the tender age of 8 or so I considered becoming a missionary. The arguments of modern science and an openness to the learning of other cultures and traditions has made me aspire to be more of a Renaissance man than a man of the cloth.  Nevertheless, the whisper of the myth stays with me.

What am I to do with my life? The whisper strums my heart as if a troubadour proclaimed the answer with resolute melancholy from a cobbled street corner. Carried softly on the wind I hear, “Be moral. Do good. Honor the miracle of your life…”