Transition

I remember my brother's arms as he reached up for me to hold him. "I want to go with you" is what he said.

He was just 4 or 5 and I was moving on, into the big world of college. Too young to understand but insightful enough to know that something was changing, he pressed me to take him along. I remember picking him up, his eyes filling with tears, his small hands holding onto me.

A line had been crossed and things would never, ever be the same. One day and I was a college kid and he was still just a kid. Bags were packed, tickets bought, time moved forward

When do those changes happen, these lines that delineate our lives appear? When do we know when it is time to move on? Is it instinctual and rhymic, something in the flow of moons and stars that drive us to move onward, towards something. What are we moving towards? What are we moving from? When is it time to go and time to stay? And what happens if you move too fast, too quickly, or worse, not at all.

What most of really fear is not death but the idea that we came to the end of our lives and never lived. Is this force what we feel at our backs, whispering us forward, driving us on?

In labor, transition is the hardest part of the entire experience but it is the pathway to a new phase of living. It is the process by which a human moves from internal life to external living, from a protected womb to an independent life. Staying put means death, moving forward no matter how difficult, means life.