I Walked Through A Cemetery Yesterday.

I Walked Through a Cemetery Yesterday. I Left Wondering Why We Are Born.

Looking at the dates on gravestones made me question time, life, death—and what it means to be here at all.

I visited a cemetery yesterday.

And somewhere between the first gravestone and the last, a question entered my mind that I haven't been able to shake.

Why are we born?

Not, What's the purpose of my life?

That's a different question.

I mean why are any of us born into a physical life when the one destination none of us can avoid is death?

I know.

Not exactly light conversation.

But stay with me.

Because something happens when you walk through a cemetery and actually read the stones.

I wasn't simply walking past them.

I was looking.

Really looking.

Names.

Dates.

Inscriptions.

Beloved mother.

Beloved father.

Husband.

Wife.

Son.

Daughter.

Some had beautiful words carved beneath their names.

Others had nothing more than a name and two dates.

And some didn't even have that.

Just a stone.

A number.

Evidence that a human being had once been here.

And my mind began to spin.

Because every stone represented an entire life.

Someone opened their eyes here.

Someone breathed.

Someone laughed.

Someone worried.

Someone loved.

Someone had ordinary days.

Someone made plans.

Someone probably thought they had plenty of time.

And then one day...

they didn't.

And that's where I got stuck.

Not on death.

I understand death in the physical sense.

Bodies age.

Bodies become sick.

Bodies stop functioning.

What I can't quite wrap my mind around is the beginning.

Why the birth in the first place?

And that question led me straight into another one.

Time.

We organize almost everything around it.

Birthdays.

Appointments.

Anniversaries.

Years.

Decades.

Deadlines.

And at the end of a life, all of that gets reduced to two dates on a stone.

Born.

Died.

And between those two dates?

Everything.

Yet I keep wondering whether time is simply how we make sense of something much larger than our ability to understand it.

What if time isn't the ultimate reality at all?

Then what exactly happens when we are born?

Do we choose to come here in human form?

I have my own beliefs about this— whether, before taking human form, there is some understanding of the experience we're about to enter.

Maybe a path. Certain people. Certain lessons...

Perhaps we do know and get to choose our experience.

Nine months of forming a physical body with the remembrance of what we chose and why we are doing the thing we chose to do.

And then suddenly— we are born.

Tiny fingers. Tiny lungs. Brand-new eyes seeing this world for the first time.

And from that moment forward, we start learning things other than the thing we chose 9 months ago, and then maybe we do or don't remember why we came. I don't know if that's true.

I only know that the thought has stayed with me.

Maybe we're not spending our lives trying to discover who we are.

Maybe we're trying to remember something we once knew before we got here, which is ultimately who we are.

Standing in that cemetery, surrounded by people who had already completed their physical lives, I couldn't stop wondering about it.

And yet as I walked around, I kept returning to the lengths of time of life...

One day.

Three years.

Twenty-seven years.

Fifty-four.

Eighty-two.

Ninety-six.

More than one hundred years.

And that's what really got me.

You look at one day and think,

That's not enough; they haven't had time to do their life.

You look at one hundred years and think,

Wow, now that's a life; they had so much time to do their stuff.

But who decides that?

If time is something we experience here in human form, how can we possibly know what makes a life complete?

Maybe a person who was here for one day did exactly what they came here to do.

I don't know that.

And that's the part that keeps stopping me.

The longer I looked at those dates, the less interested I became in how long each person lived or whether they somehow had the opportunity to choose their path in those 9 months of pre-birth.

Instead, I became intensely aware of something else.

My own mortality.

My second date hasn't been carved yet.

And suddenly that felt important.

Because right now I still have a physical body.

I can walk.

I can breathe.

I can experience love.

Frustration.

Happiness.

Loss.

Anger.

Pleasure.

Fear.

Wonder.

Maybe all of it is part of why we are born. To experience life and what it has to offer - from its challenges to its glories- because maybe that's where we remember.

Again, I don't know the answer to that, and sure it'd be a heck of a lot easier if someone handed us a menu that said Pick Your Human Experience.

Yesterday I walked into a cemetery to visit people and friends who had died, not thinking about my own mortality or other things, really.

And I walked out thinking much more about being alive and the privilege of having a physical body to walk around between those stones, eyes capable of reading the names, a mind curious to ask questions, and the underlying knowledge to pay much more attention to noticing my life while I'm living it.

Because that's the strangest part of all. You know you're alive.

But how often do you actually notice your life?

I still don't know why one person gets 100 years, and another gets one day or less. But maybe we're not supposed to understand it all while we're here.

All I really know right now today is this:

I'm here.

You're here.

And right now, neither one of us has reached that second date.

Maybe that's enough reason to pay attention.