Children are the hand of the past reaching toward the future. 

   The strange thing about our children is that they’re clearly their own thing, their own life. But the more you think about it, the more your realize there is only one life, and all we do is hand it on, not create it. 

   A child is the creation of something new, a new form within the world, but the life that gave rise to it never stops existing. The cells that came from the mother and father are their own living cells, and they don’t stop living. The life that was in me, my cells, my essence, part of me, it stayed alive. It is still alive. Those cells of mine just kept dividing and grew into something new and (somewhat) autonomous. In a way that part of me is still in there. Somehow, by some insane miracle, it joined with those of another, and those stayed alive too.

   We literally are, in the most basic way, the living continuation and combination of our parents. The connection was never broken. My living cell, part of me, was alive when it merged with my wife’s. They both stayed alive. They sustained one another, they inhabited one another, they divided together, they grew. They continued. They still are alive. What is a child but part of yourself and part of your spouse that joins for survival and renewal and just keeps living and growing outside you?

    In this way we hand on the life that is in us. It exists, as a kind of miracle. We don’t create it from nothing. It doesn’t end with us. It doesn’t begin with us. We don’t come from nothing. We come from and literally are everything that came before us. The same life is in us, unbroken, that has been handed down for centuries, surviving all this time, slightly different in each generation. But there are no lives. There is no appearing and disappearing of lights. There is one flame. And we pass along our part of it. And it never stops being, as long as we survive. As long as we embrace the process that raises us up and let’s us hand it on. 

    The fire takes new forms, new vessels, but the flame never goes out. Death comes constantly to smother it. We spread the fire out so it cannot all be taken at once. We find the strongest and most beautiful vessels and reproduce them, to reproduce the best in the forms the fire can take. The shadow takes many unwillingly, some willingly, and some without knowing how they stood still and let it take them.

   The flame must always be in motion, it must always be being handed off. It cannot stop, cannot stay, cannot begin from nothing and nowhere, and must not end in one dwelling. It exists to be passed on and find new life in the giving. The same life, in a new time and place.

   I am alive in my children. Not metaphorically, literally. And my predecessors live in me. And they live also in my children. And I see those bits of them alive in my children, the past reaching forward. It is not merely a resemblance, as of something carved in imitation, those people of the past, the life and the meaning and structure that was theirs is still in existence. It was handed on. It stayed alive. It never died. It only changed vessels. It transformed across the handing. 

   We cannot make anything from nothing. Life and being are given to us, and we choose how to hand them on. It is a sacred trust. We carry the life of the species within us, the inheritance, the very lives, of all who struggled and came before, who fought to give us this gift, handing it down faithfully. It is strange how truly accurate to the last detail the metaphor of two becoming one in sex and marriage is. Children are the literal fruit of such a joining. They are nothing more nor less than the two becoming one, in continued existence. And on it goes, that existence, that life, that flame. A quixotic enigma in a sea of enveloping shadows that seek to swallow it; ever succeeding, but somehow ever falling short and finding it still afloat.