There is a picture of my mother and me on my fifth birthday. I am sitting on my nanny’s knee in one of the many special dresses my mother bought for me. I have a life-sized white doll with bleach blonde hair across my knee. I am smiling into the camera with the smile that those who know me well will recognise. It is the one I wear when I am being silly or when I’ve said something terribly clever or when I am uncontainably happy with the person that I am with. My mother is looking at me with the smile that she smiled at me all my life. Look at my baby, it is saying, look at her joy. She is smiling into my smile as I smile out at the world. The inevitability of death. The necessity of it as it defines life. If time is linear, the possibility of growing into a higher state of awareness than our parents did. If it is cyclical, the continual realisation of our own smallness in the face of all things. Fragments of time. Glimpses of knowledge through that love, which illuminates us and makes us known. Consciousness in the place of imagination. Our continual striving towards knowledge, towards connection, towards sight. Our eternal ignorance in the face of life and death. There is another picture of my mother on that same fifth birthday. She is dancing and her arms reach out beyond the parameters of the photo. She smiles out into the world and her smile is one of infinite possibilities