The Burden of Birth
Perhaps the cruelest thing about being human is that we are born into lives we never chose, inherit realities we never questioned, and spend the rest of our existence trying to understand why the world is the way it is.
Somewhere in this world, a child is learning to walk, while somewhere else, a child is learning to run from gunfire. One is being taught to dream, the other to survive. One grows up with the luxury of questioning the meaning of life, while the other spends their entire life searching for a reason to continue living it. And neither of them chose where they would begin. Yet, somehow, the world expects both to make something of their existence, as though life were an equal bargain offered to everyone, as though we were all handed the same pieces and simply chose to play differently. We speak so confidently about discipline, character, morality, and the consequences of our actions, but rarely do we consider how much of a person is shaped by circumstances that existed long before they possessed the consciousness to understand them. We judge people by the lives they have built without ever asking what they were forced to build upon.
Perhaps this is where our understanding of human existence begins to fall apart. We have evolved to a point where we can observe ourselves, question our own existence, contemplate the universe, and search for meaning in things that may never offer us an answer. Yet, despite all our intellectual progress, we remain profoundly limited by the circumstances of our birth. Our earliest understanding of love, fear, morality, God, and the world itself is shaped by the environment into which we arrive. A person raised in tenderness may grow up believing that people are fundamentally good. Someone raised in cruelty may spend their entire life anticipating betrayal. One person finds comfort in religion because faith has given them something to hold on to; another struggles to reconcile that same faith with the suffering they have witnessed. We often mistake our own perception of reality for reality itself, forgetting that the human mind does not experience the world as it is in its entirety, but through the narrow and deeply personal lens of its own experiences.
And perhaps that is why we misunderstand one another so profoundly. We expect people to see what we see, to feel what we feel, and to arrive at the same conclusions, forgetting that no two people have inhabited the same existence. Even siblings raised under the same roof can emerge with entirely different understandings of life, because what one person remembers as an ordinary childhood, another may remember as a period of quiet suffering. Our experiences do not merely influence our opinions; they shape the very framework through which we interpret the world. What appears insignificant to one person may be unbearable to another. What one calls weakness may be the consequence of years of suffering that the other has never had to endure. And what we call a bad decision may have been the only decision someone could imagine making from within the reality they had come to know. This does not mean that every action can be justified by suffering, but it should make us cautious about assuming that we understand the entirety of another person's circumstances simply because we can observe their behaviour.
The unfairness of existence becomes even more difficult to comprehend when we begin to consider the question of God. If there is a divine order to this universe, how are we, with our limited understanding, supposed to reconcile it with the extraordinary inequality of human suffering? It is difficult to explain divine justice to someone whose entire life has been an experience of injustice. These are uncomfortable questions, and perhaps they should be. And what about the answers? Perhaps there are answers that lie beyond the limits of human comprehension. Perhaps there are dimensions of existence that our present understanding cannot penetrate. But the possibility of an answer does not mean that we possess it, and faith should not require us to pretend that we have resolved every contradiction. To question the fairness of life is not necessarily to reject God; sometimes, it is to acknowledge the distance between the human mind and whatever ultimate truth it is attempting to understand. We should be able to admit that we do not know. There is a certain intellectual honesty in allowing a question to remain unanswered rather than forcing it into an explanation that merely comforts us.
What troubles me most is the realization that we are not even fully responsible for the minds with which we attempt to understand these questions. Before we learn to think independently, we have already absorbed the fears, prejudices, beliefs, and expectations of the people around us. Before we begin questioning our surroundings, those surroundings have already begun shaping the person who will eventually do the questioning. We inherit a language through which we interpret reality, a culture through which we understand morality, and a collection of beliefs that may take us decades to recognize as inherited rather than independently discovered. Even our idea of freedom is influenced by the world in which we learn what freedom means.
And then, at some point, consciousness turns inward. We begin to observe our own thoughts instead of accepting them unquestioningly. We ask ourselves why we desire what we desire, why certain experiences frighten us, why we seek validation, why we attach ourselves to people, and why we continue to pursue things that often leave us dissatisfied. Perhaps this is what spiritual traditions have attempted to describe through the metaphor of the third eye: not necessarily the acquisition of some supernatural ability, but a shift in perception, a willingness to look beyond the immediate demands of the ego and examine the mechanisms through which we experience ourselves and the world. It is the difference between being consumed by a thought and recognizing that you are having one; between blindly inheriting a belief and examining why you believe it; between reacting to the world through conditioning and becoming aware of the conditioning itself.
And, hopefully, that’s where we begin to take the baton…
