In our family, November is a big month for birthdays.  I had mine a couple of weeks ago, and we celebrated my wife's last Friday.  How funny it is, that despite the seemingly endless points over which people disagree, the vast disparities and differences in income, vocation, and station in the human family, and the marvelously diverse political, cultural, and religious loyalties that mark human beings, all of us, every single one of us, has a birthday.  At some point in history, at some unique singularity in space and time, we all were born.  We all have a date of birth.

     It's really rather extraordinary:  for untold millennia we were not here, and then, one day, in the proverbial flash of a moment, we were.  We began.  As did everything else.  Once upon a time, actually, once upon a time before time even began (another rather perplexing notion which, although it is the only way to make sense of the fact of beginning, is equally difficult to grasp), "being" began.
     And how we all treasure it.  How we all love and value our lives.  And how much most of us try to hang on to them for as long as we can.  For this reason, even if we are indifferent to them, we appreciate our birthdays. They mean that we are still here.  They remind us that we still "are."

     Yet as we all know, what begins eventually ends.  And what will we do then?  I ask because if there was once a time beyond time out of which time came, there will be a time beyond time into which time will one day end.  We do not live in a vacuum, and neither does existence.
     It's difficult to picture life without death, yes, but it's even more difficult to picture life without a life from which it comes.