We are born twice. The first birth is the 'real' birth, the gnarly one, the one with the umbilical cord. Nobody remembers anything from their birth, which is probably for the better, nor do people remember much from the years immediately afterwards. It seems that most people place their earliest memory around 4 years old, but it’s an interesting exercise: what is your earliest memory, and how old were you? My early memories seem quite fuzzy and shuffled, so much so that I can’t even pin down a specific one.
We are born again when we first have the thought ‘I am alive, and I am a conscious entity.’ That’s our second birth. Because it’s only when that notion enters our mind that we actually acknowledge our own existence. As babies, we don’t confront the fact we’re alive in anything other than the most primal fashion. But as our capacity for thought develops — as incrementally as our capacity for reaching the cereal shelf — we slowly become aware that we are a breathing and odd conscious thing in this universe. What to make of that interval between the first birth and the second birth? It was a time when I went through all the motions of life and yet never stopped to watch myself, and say ‘hey, would you look at that!’