Happy Mother’s Day. This is a mother’s day like no other, as this day is an important threshold for our species, our life, and all future generations. It is right to pay homage to our mothers, whether we knew them well or not, whether we think of them with a bursting heart full of gladness, or a longing tinged with sorrow. It is always right to recall and remember, to feel, though we can never fully understand all that led to us being who we are, where we are, and whose we are. I think of my own mother this day with great fondness and poignancy.
Life is short. As I get older, I see how quickly life passes, and how often opportunities are lost to express how we truly feel, to express gratitude, to express love for what we received and who we were enabled to become. Whether that becoming came from difficulty or ease, or for most of us a combination of both, we come from that which we did not create, for which we owe some kind of acknowledgement. One day is not enough to adequately honor our mothers, to honor where we came from, and those who made us who we are. One lifetime is not enough. I think of my own mother, Bimla, who came from mothers who made her life possible. A life in Northern India, a life impacted by empire, by British colonialism. A life that traveled from Northern India to the small, tiny island of Fiji near the continent of Australia, where her mothers of the past worked as indentured servants harvesting sugar cane. I think of my mother’s life and the handful of memories she shared with me like fragments, like poems, like pieces of a puzzle that leave me with a sense I will never understand and put together the complete picture. Fragments like: homework by candlelight, chickens and palm trees, long dirt roads. I think of all thresholds crossed, thresholds of geography, thresholds of perception, thresholds of race, thresholds of class – Am I poor? Or Am I rich now?, thresholds of nationality, thresholds of identity. It’s enough to make a head spin for an entire lifetime, and this is just one simple woman’s life, a life that is both common and singular, the life of my mother.
The life of my mother entered new territory both inner and outer, and out of this new territory, new identity, new possibility, out of the thrust of grit and confusion, of escape and homecoming, my life has begun. So too your life has begun. You too, born in this world, coming from lands both seen and unseen, real and imagined – is there really a difference? A land full of threshold moments, all before you gasped for your first breath.
One day is not adequate enough time to dedicate to this. One lifetime is not enough. But it’s what we’ve got. So let’s make the most of it, shall we? A whole life was happening before we were born. I state the obvious, because only in facing the obvious can we come to terms with that which is most fundamental and important. A whole life was happening full of discoveries, full of adventure, full of hope and dreams and heartache, full of sickness, full of death, full of migrations, full of identity shifts, full of aha moments, full of doubt, full of angst, full of lust, full of life. This was all happening before any of us gasped, and felt the sensation of oxygen filling our bodies, animating us into the life we would grow into.
Many thresholds were crossed just to get us here. Most of them we’ll never fully know or appreciate, many of them our own mothers never probably knew or appreciated. It is appropriate thus to see that a large swath of our life, a large bulk of our collective life force were already conceived in prior thresholds. Our life as we know it today, the large bits – our genes, even our outlook, personality and disposition shaped and molded, conceived at thresholds none of us alive, here, today will remember. The breath that breathes us owes itself to a threshold we never visited, at least not in this body.
Why bring all this up? Well, because we live in a culture that is defined by the right of an individual to make a choice. We prize the ability each one of us has as an individual to make a choice for our life, and thus choose what our life is and what it is not. We live in a milieu that only sees the past as a story, a prop to serve our own individual choices in this time and place and circumstance, and that our life is a collection of all the choices we rightfully choose for ourselves today. We are trained to believe that our life today is the product of all the individual choices we make, and thus no person or entity or government should infringe on our individual sense of choice, for then we shall not be free. We believe we are only free to the extent that we make an individual choice, and that choice is the primary characteristic of our life
A pandemic, I’m finding, can be conducive to deeper reflection. And often this deeper reflection is not found in theories but in noticing, acknowledging, and properly honoring the obvious. Our life is not our life, not in the way that we typically conceive of it. Our life is not like a piece of property like a car or a trumpet, that we can see its limits, take it out for a ride or a song, and polish it from time to time. A life is not something we own, manage, and we certainly didn’t create it. Our life is a collection of the thresholds crossed before we gasped for our first breath. Our life begins with our mother. Our life begins with our father’s mother. Our life begins before the time they ever had a word called mother, in all the thresholds crossed before we gasped in gratitude for our first breath.
All the borders crossed, all the laws crossed, all the people who crossed, all the ideals died, born and reborn again, all the poor fingers and toes drawing figures in long dirt roads, by candlelight, under trees we did not plant. The trees have sprouted fruit, and our life is like the fruit – juicy,supple, soft, quickly turning as we feel the sun on our skin.
Our life is not ours. We did not grow ourselves. Our entire life is the process, the inevitable process of past thresholds already crossed. My entire life is the natural fruit, the natural embodiment of all the choices made before I gasped my first breath. The nation I did not create, the economic system I did not create, the language I did not create, the cowlicks in my hair I did not place or plant, even the gift of speech – none of it is mine. It belongs, every last detail, to my mother, and the mother of all of us.
Having a mother is equal to having a life, a life that we fictitiously call our own. Meaning, it can get complicated, in fact it’s guaranteed to get complicated. A mother is the cause and focus of every human emotion imaginable, the greatest heights and lowest lows, the most joy and the most sorrow we are capable of yielding.
Our life we think may be the result of our choices, but I invite us this mother’s day to look a little deeper. The most important thresholds of our lifetime have already been crossed. All the hardship of this day is the fruit of toil and hope of years gone by. My sense of identity: my nationality, my sense of personhood, all my gifts, all my folly – is it to be found in the stars, dear Brutus, or is it to be found in ourselves? The thresholds crossed by our mother, and all mothers, has made our life what it is. It has created the right conditions for our unique flower to blossom, it is what has caused our singular life to bloom, even in times of drought and desperation. It has defined the length and breadth of our life, its scope and possibility, even if our own mothers like we ourselves could scarcely conceive of it. All of it – the parts we like, the parts we don’t, the parts we recall the parts we don’t – all of it is now our life.
So if you follow this logic all the way to its conclusion, you may think I’m leading to Freud: Is all this, then our mother’s fault? Haha, no. I will not leave you with that message on mother’s day or any day. I never follow logic all the way to its logical conclusion, because life is too absurd and wily for that kind of nonsense. You may be wondering then: If the bulk of our life is made of past thresholds already crossed, what about the thresholds we are facing today, now, in our life as we understand it?
We have some amazing and life changing thresholds that are presenting itself immediately in our current moment. It’s enough to make anyone’s head spin. The State of Ohio is about to open up all retail stores, all barbershops and salons, all restaurants including buffet. The economy and life as we knew it will be back by May 21st, except not really. The governor and our health director have been disturbingly honest that this is a “high risk” operation, and all of this will inevitably lead to more sickness. So why do this? The answer has been consistent and clear: it is not because the health risk is lower, it is because the cost to our economy is too great. There is not enough federal funding to keep our state’s businesses afloat, and so the burden of keeping our economy afloat will be the average person like you and me who are being asked to risk our life to resume these businesses or thus be blamed for their failure. All of this is occurring of course while there is still limited testing available, and assistance is slow and not forthcoming. I feel for everyone involved in this debacle. I feel first for you and me, I feel for our local business owners and politicians who have to operate in a system where they are so dependent on business as we know it. It is a tough bind, it’s a grind, and it has been and continues to be an inhumane operation. All of this is crystal clear, as we face this threshold.
So will your individual choices make a difference in the coming weeks and months? Absolutely, but probably not in the way you imagine. Your choices will not make your life your own. Your individual choices will not give you the breath that allows you to gasp for air. Your individual choices will not set the parameters for our life. Those have already been set by thresholds already crossed.
Our individual choices today will birth tomorrow. The thresholds we cross and shy away from today will set the parameters for those on the other side of this threshold. Our choices will dictate and create the world, and more importantly the world-view of what is on the other side of this threshold. Our crossing at this moment is not about us. It never was about us. It never will be about us. Our crossing or avoidance of the thresholds of this moment will not make or break our life. Our crossing on this day, this week, and in these coming months will set the course, will define the frame, will shape the life we can feel in our insides today but will never witness manifest.
It is a dangerous thing to think that our choices are what make our life our life. It is a dangerous thing to forget where we came from, and fail to honor the mother of us all. It is a dangerous thing to fool ourselves into thinking that our choices only shape and impact our individual life. The thresholds we cross or fail to cross today will not be for our life. It will not be for us.
So let us remember and honor our mothers this day, and every day in our brief lifetime. The thresholds they crossed have led to our life, for our ability to gasp for air and wonder in pure confusion at the wonderment of this moment, the moment of threshold, the moment of crossing that was never meant for us, but only for those who will come after.
