Daily Inspiration Quote by Douglas Horton

Death gets the starring role in our anxieties because it feels like an ending we can picture, while birth is an origin we can’t even access. Horton, a 20th-century clergyman steeped in pastoral reality, isn’t offering a cute symmetry; he’s diagnosing a selective memory problem that religion has always tried to treat. We fear death not only because it hurts and separates, but because it’s narratable: we can imagine the last breath, the hospital room, the unfinished plans. Birth, by contrast, is structurally unrememberable. It’s a trauma and a miracle we only know through other people’s stories, photos, and paperwork. So we treat it as “normal,” an administrative fact, while death becomes a metaphysical emergency.

The line works because it’s quietly accusatory. It implies that dread isn’t purely rational; it’s partly a byproduct of ego. We forget birth because it undermines the fantasy of self-authorship. Remembering, viscerally, that we arrived helpless and unaware would shrink the importance we assign to our control and our narratives. Death threatens that narrative from the other side, so we inflate it into the ultimate scandal.

In a Christian-inflected context, Horton also nudges the reader toward a reframing: if you can live with the mystery of how you began, you can learn to live with the mystery of how you end. The subtext is pastoral: anxiety eases when you accept that the biggest thresholds of human life are, by design, not fully legible from the inside.