“Why was I born?”

Coltrane’s “Why was I born” has been swelling in my chest. Often if a piece or a person resonates with me, I feel this swelling sensation- something like my diaphragm is filling with water, but it’s comfortable. A gentle drowning. Upon my first encounter with the song and in many encounters after that one, I thought it was meant to be melancholy. I imagined someone, not unlike myself, perhaps arriving at the realization that she is an unemployed, recent college graduate with few ideas about how to move forward, only knowing that it’s necessary to do so- she must do something and go somewhere. This person at this point in time might get a little down and ask the question, “why was I born?”

Today, which will be yesterday by the time I’ve posted this and maybe “many days ago” by the time you’re reading, I began to interpret the titular question in a different and decidedly more joyful way. In this new reading,”why was I born?” became the start to a realization of the self, and this realization requires the kind of search that gets lost if you never have time or take time to reflect on the many big and small questions that arise in the course of the day.

I’ve been trying to figure out a lot of things in not a lot of time, and while that doesn’t seem very fair to myself or the subjects that I’m examining, I’ve arrived at something. The something is that there is no way of knowing, at least definitively, why I was born. But if I can consider my purpose for being in the same way that I encountered the Coltrane piece then I might think about how I reframe. I mean to express that I first received the Coltrane piece in one way, but some days later, for no real reason at all, it became something else. Likewise, it seems that my purpose can’t be one thing because I am constantly forced to reevaluate myself and the world around me, to the point that many of my previous interpretations are now outdated.

Essentially what I’m saying is that there are so many starts and instances of being “born” so that there are infinite opportunities to have a purpose, which can never be the only purpose. In these instances, after the birth story that we all have in common, the important detail becomes the how and not the “why” of being born, the circumstances and the self at that very particular moment that coalesce into a new beginning.

Recently, a friend said that twenty-two sounds “so old”. As a gift to myself on my twenty-second birthday, I’ve written this hopeful reframe.