Here is what we grow toward.

Life begins in the first gasp of breath, when you take the outside world into your body for the first time and let it fill your lungs. When you give back to the world by exhaling, letting that piece of the world out again. So begins our relationship with human existence.

If you’re healthy, you’re expected to cry big lusty cries, gulping the world in greedily so you can send it screaming back out again.

Mothers hold their babies and feel whole and halved all at once, and they might cry, too, an overwhelmed give and take with the world. Gentle, thankful exhalations or great gulping sobs of fear and exhilaration. We feel it all at once.

Babies are calmer nestled against their mothers, mothers calmer nestled against their babies. So begins our relationship with eternity.

Plans are made. We imagine great big lives for our babies; we imagine the whole world for them. We see all the potential in them, expect to see them grow bigger than the room that holds them, to have every bit of greatness you ever imagined and were too scared to strive for, and then some. And somehow that they will still fit within us, that our shared bodies will still make sense in some cosmic way.

Sometimes our plans work and we are relieved or smug or both. Sometimes our plans don’t work and we despair.

But here is what we grow toward, regardless of plans: a simple life, a smaller life. We don’t ever really want to be bigger than a room. We do want to be contained, to fit somewhere. We want our lives to be small enough to slip into a pocket and go. What we really want is freedom.

Our lives end in rooms, in beds or chairs, in our bodies that will no longer accept the world, regardless of the plans we made. This is the universe’s plan for you, and it is never smug when its plans are realized, and its plans are always realized.

If you lived well, your life fitting just so into your pocket or the palm of your hand, the universe will cast its eyes up into the sky in relief, in thanks, to be carrying a soul so light and free that it can rise and fill a galaxy.