The Silver Spoon
(Original Post from Dr. Brenner’s personal Blog, July 10, 2013)
As an Ob/GYN, I had an epiphany; I realized that the newborn is love made visible. What happens to that love? A guru once told me at birth, “we are all similar to a silver spoons thrown in the ocean, and if we are lucky before we die, we find our spoon, and if we are very lucky before we die, we have a chance to remove all that rust and to acknowledge who we have always been, a silver spoon”. Each one of us has taken on the rust of previous generations and added to it, but we are, in our depth of existence, love made visible and so is every other person on this planet. As a cancer surgeon and as a person who still works at a cancer center, I have sat with many through the dying process and watched individuals go through their anger, pettiness and selfishness as if they were shedding toxic emotional baggage, not unlike the precipitate that remain in a glass beaker after distillation of liquid. The precipitate is our external what, our facade of what we thought was important in order to be seen, recognized, accepted. I believe that what is distilled in the dying process is loving presence, the essential self.
Our ancestors strove to achieve more in order to assure survival. We are reaching a place in history when more is leading to less. We were driven by the old Robert Browning adage, “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp.” The need to be more and have more must be replaced by, “I am enough, and I have enough.” It is a time to heal our inner insecurities, to accept our ordinariness, rather then trying to prove our special ness. It is the responsibility of each of us to reclaim our birthright of love of self by meeting our own unmet needs instead of asking others to meet them for us. It is essential to forgive ourselves and provide an environment of self-love for generations to come and finally, see that same love in others.
Paul Brenner, M.D., PhD