Understanding the Life-Force

At a family dinner, we were talking about religion when my nephew Tom spoke up. "I don't have what you'd call a religion," he said, "but I was stopped in traffic on Route 22 on a really hot day...."

We all envisioned that miserable stretch of highway with its oppressive landscape of stores and miles of parking lots. Tom continued. "I was just looking out at that cement median barrier. And there was this weed growing out of it."

In those few words, I recognized my own religious perspective. I think of it as the life-force. It persists in generating life beyond all reason.

A friend of mine found this out last year when she lost the ability to swallow food and decided to die quickly at home. Her many friends hurried to say goodbye. But there was plenty of time; it took seven full weeks for her to die. Her body, without food, consumed itself. Then it took its place in the nitrogen cycle we learned about in high school. In the mysterious mathematics of the life-force, even death begets life.

I came face to face with the life-force when our daughter Katie was born almost four months prematurely and heartbreakingly small. Too immature to process food, she received only sugar-water through a tube in a holding pattern that lasted three weeks. Then one day we were alarmed to see a round swelling on each thin cheek like tiny pink apples. The nurses explained that Katie had started to develop the muscles she would need to suck. They literally appeared overnight because they were on a fast track. Katie's life-force had been with her all along, and it was dictating her priorities--sucking muscles first, everything else later.

It's this single-minded nature of the life-force, I think, that induces people to go on when it makes more sense to just give up. Even in a catastrophe, we somehow find ourselves putting one foot in front of the other. Our bodies refuse to stop living, and our minds process and manipulate the catastrophe until we come up with an understanding that has meaning for us--an understanding that we can live with.

Because life is the whole point. Evolutionary biologists are happy to spell out the details that make this so. But science can only glimpse the unthinking power that animates our every cell through life, death and life again.