The circle of life

The crazy thing about life is that it is a cycle. There is never a time when life takes a break from going on and we are left in a glitch; an unfinished moment; a frozen incident. It always moves forward, towards completion; towards ends and new beginnings. Life and time always have a way of loosening your grip of a painful experience, or bringing 'reality' into the memory of a good one. Life has a way of taking you by surprise. Ending stories you thought would go on forever. Creating a masterpiece from nothing.

A few Sunday mornings ago something wonderful happened.

I was promoted from being a daughter and a sister, to being an aunt. The six odd hours I spent outside my sister's hospital room while she was giving birth to new life, gave me time to ponder; to worry; to wonder how the story would unfold. Past experiences in the family had not always been pleasant.

Life and Death work in such close proximity. I'd always known that. And it's a terrifying thought. But it is also an awesome thought: the uncertainty, the element of mystery, the ultimate truth about life – it is not in our hands. We are, in the end, more vulnerable than we know. And as terrifying as this is, it is also beautiful.

I realised then, in the midst of all these thoughts that the story of this new baby, wasn't just about to start: instead it had started centuries – no, millennia – before her birth. It started with the beginning of the world. But let me just take you to the year 1917.

On July 22, 1917, a little baby was born in Bulathkohupitiya, to a father who ran away from his home as a young boy and who kept his heritage a secret to the end, and a young mother, whose father was a red-haired Scotsman.

The two were married in Malaysia, where they lived for a period of time before returning home for the birth of their baby girl, Freda Harriet Jinadasa, the oldest of seven children.

Many years later, young Ms. Jinadasa, who was proficient in French and mathematics, and was a promising sportswoman, was spotted on the tennis court by the handsome Percival Weerasooriya, who was patrolling the area on his sturdy motor bike.

The two fell in love and married, producing three strapping boys and one little girl.

The third strapping boy, a champion athlete and Kandyan dancer, decided to take up a Government career, which sent him to Pakistan for three years in the mid-1960s for training.

Little did he know, he would return to Sri Lanka to marry the young girl who lived next door and produce a strapping son of his own.

Following his strapping son came two daughters, seven complete years apart, though they are often mistaken for twins, even to this day.

Some thirty years after his training in Pakistan, the Government Servant was deployed back to Pakistan in a different capacity for a further six years.

Over one of those hot Pakistani summer breaks, the older of his daughters met a young hazel-eyed American soldier while vacationing in the woods of Pennsylvania.

Two years later the two tied the knot in Pakistan, and headed to Sri Lanka to start a home.

And all this brings us to Sunday the July 22, 2007 – when exactly 90 years after the birth of her great grandmother, Araliya Grace was born.

All the anxiety, the stress, the questions, culminated in this little white flower; delicate, soft and pure. With her, one story ended while another one began. And from her story a million more will ripple into life.

Connected together by the fact that every character is a human being set on earth to live and learn. Life cannot come to an end because its story continues forever.

Such is the beauty of this never-ending cycle, which started when the world began.