This I Believe

The first cry of a newly born child is beautiful. In most other circumstances, wailing and screaming is associated with loss, fear, or suffering. But the first cry of an infant is the breath of life, as the child transitions from being sustained by the mother to sustaining herself. The lungs inflate, the flow of blood in the heart changes, arteries and veins open and close, and that first warm, beautiful scream expresses a miracle. I know this academically because I just finished my first year of medical school. The lecture on infant circulation was dumbfounding in complexity and intricacy. But I know this on a much more personal basis. I spent a summer in Mongolia when I was in college. I was staying in a little valley hundreds of miles from electricity when a Mongolian lady went into labor and I was privileged to catch, and later name, her newborn son. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, but when I heard that first cry, I knew all was well. Even more recently my wife and I had our first child, a little girl, and although her cry now tells me that she’s hungry or tired, I recognized her first cry of life and cried myself for the beauty.

I can’t think of anything more precious than life, for all else that is precious means nothing without life to experience and appreciate it. Of course life is full of pain and tragedy. I don’t always agree with Frankl’s writing, but perhaps he was correct in asserting that suffering is valuable simply because it is experienced. Tolstoy couldn’t invent a character to prevent Anna Karenina from throwing herself beneath a train, but there is something inexplicable in that she knew that her circumstances were deplorable and tragic. The great complexity of the mind is that it can differentiate between the admirable and the deplorable; great complexity that is part of the beauty of life.

This I believe: that life is beautiful and to be regarded above all else. The magnitude of the first breath, the preciousness of a newborn, and the inexplicable nature of the human mind resound with the unique and paramount quality that is human life. This belief led me to medical school, but it is also this belief that causes me to abhor ending a life, whether it is the life of an unborn human with all its fantastic potential and helpless fragility, the life of a dark mind convicted of unspeakable crimes, or the life of someone who appears to be my enemy and is entirely foreign to my thinking. The circumstances little affect the principal, for once the life is ended, the hope for beauty is put out.