As sands through the hourglass…
by Primo Encarnación
According to the world population clock, there are 7.3 billion people. In terms of sand, that’s roughly 7.3 dump trucks full. Imagine all those dump trucks, and all that sand. Imagine walking up to one of them. There is a bumper, with a light spray of sand on it that didn’t quite get into the bed. Brush that sand away with the edge of your hand, gently subdividing the pile, until a few grains remain. Now you are squatting in front of the bumper: take your fingers, and brush more grains away. There are two grains left. Flick one aside, wet your finger, and pick up the last, single, solitary grain of sand.
Step back. Back up far enough so you can see all 7.3 trucks. Now hold up your finger and regard that one grain of sand stuck there.
That’s you.
That little piece of grit that you’d notice if it was under your eyelid, but that you had to concentrate NOT to brush away with all of the other ones, indistinguishable from all of the other ones.
Insignificant, you.
But, I’m an AMERICAN, you crow! That makes me special! Really? You see that one dump truck that’s only not-quite 1/3 of the way full? Watch it drive off. That’s the US of A. Gone. There’s still 7 entire dump trucks full of sand. Ain’t you bad!
I’m a Christian! That makes me special. Oh yeah? Two dump trucks on the left drive away. There are your Christians. Two dump trucks on the right drive away. There go the Muslims. Three whole entire dump trucks full of sand left.
How special are you now?
You’re nothing.
So where do you get off punching someone who insulted you? Where do you get off telling other people how to live their lives? What allows you to decide that you’re going to buy a gun specifically to wipe other people out, because their set of cosmological fairy tales does not dovetail EXACTLY with your set of cosmological fairy tales.
What unimaginable hubris is at work in your tiny, tiny brain when you buy a box of nails for shrapnel to bomb that church? How incredibly full of yourself are you when you are trying to decide what type of cloth works best as a wick on a Molotov cocktail? How hyper-inflated is your ego as you slide that last round into a magazine, knowing that it will be the first out of the barrel and into the brain of somebody you never met before, or into the brain of your best friend, or into the brain of your wife, because YOU are righteous, and somebody’s done YOU wrong, and somebody’s got to pay!
You’re not righteous. You’re not special. You’re nobody. You’re nothing but a single grain of sand, whose only value is as one of many, many other grains of sand. Together, you can hold back tides. Together, you can stop bullets. Together you can not only change history, you are history.
Do you want to feel special? Do you deserve this, that or the other? Why? Why YOU, and not these others? Why are the two dump trucks full of devotees of middle eastern fairy tales any better, or any worse, or in any way different than the other two dump trucks full of other devotees of other middle eastern fairy tales?
You are only special in so far as the others are special. The only legitimate way to exalt yourself is if all the other grains of sand are exalted in the same way. Doing away with other pieces of sand does not make you special, or rare, or important. It just reduces the meaning of being sand.
Everybody has a right to sleep safe and warm. To eat nutritious food and to drink clean water. To live in an unraped ecosystem. To be unraped themselves. To live free from fear. They have the right to their thoughts, their beliefs, their opinions, and the right to voice them. They have a right to be with others, or to be alone. They have the right, quite simply, to be.
As long as everyone has those rights, you have those rights. But as soon as you try to take them away from anyone, then yours are no longer safe, either.
If you can kill anyone you want because of some slight, real or imagined. If you can kill anyone you want because you think that’s what your god wants. If you can kill anyone you want because America, dammit! Then anyone can kill you for whatever reason is important to them, too.
He who humbles himself shall be exalted, the fairy tales say. Be sand, people. Be the best grain of sand you can be. Be within yourself. Lift up the other grains around you, that you may be lifted by them.
Those seven point three dump trucks? They are dumping sand into the top of a giant hourglass. You and the 7.3 billion other grains are swirling in a sand maelstrom. Eventually, it will be your single, solitary turn to fall all alone through the opening into…
But that’s the only time in your hourglass that you must be truly alone. At that moment, how does one measure the worth of a grain of sand?
Wow.
1Lot to think about. Thank you.
Well,I cancelled Dish programming yesterday-after 17 years with them. I guess that makes me special. At least I’m not about to shout it out to the entire world I’m special.
Never thought of myself as sand colored. BTW,what color is a single grain of sand? One last thing. I read somewhere that if you stick a finger in a pail of water and then take your finger out,the hole you leave behind in the water shows you how significant you are in the overall scheme of being.
2In the overall scheme of things: “Life’s a bitch… and then you die”.
Great commentary.
Thanks.
3And this illustrates the problem with my philosophy, which states you do your thing and leave me alone you bigoted control freak!!!
4There are at least 2 dump trucks trying to tell this grain of sand how to live and die, and other then overwhelming number they are all dimwitted moroons who think they are special. So think, vote wisely, and support the constitution as that is the only thing between your little grain of sand and the 2 dump trucks of idiot control freaks.
Actually e platypus onion, that finger example is looked at the wrong way. It shows just how important you are, because with out your finger maintaining the hole it would disappear!!!!
5Excellent perspective, Primo!
However, don’t expect the snacilbupeR swine to go into a frenzy of introspection or calcium carbonate production. They will not relate to sand. Oh no, they know what special little snowflakes they are.
e platypus onion, beach sands come in as wide an array of hues as do people. From the white sands of Dover to the black beaches of Hawaii, sand is sand pretty much like people are people.
6Hubris? My personal opinion is that suicide terrorists are convinced that somehow they are going to be around afterwards to see all the “fun” they’ve stirred up.
That’s hubris.
7Yeah,PKM,but only white,’murrican,kristian sand has been blessed by gawd and all the little gawdalmighties as being “Special.”
Gene Pitney got it right. Love your Muslim women friends.-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_IXw1UOQJ8
8And here I thought it was just me…..
9Thank you, Primo. I’m sure this essay will touch a lot of readers; it touched me.
10Hear, hear!
Thanks for that perspective. To quote one of the Founding Fathers (Ben Franklin, maybe?), “We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
We’ve only got one planet. We should try not to blow it up.
11Thank you!
12But common sense and reason are rare traits in someone who has the soul sickness of Bigotry.
Love, tolerance and education are helpful in overcoming this harmful disease, not support and encouragement.
Bigotry – “Fear and Hate of anyone/anything that does not look, think, act, or believe like you do.”
Thank you, Primo. But, might I add this?
Take about 200 million of those grains of sand and float each one in a bubble; a bubble of their own thoughts, fears, doubts and prejudices, isolated from all the other grains of sand. Got the image? Good. Welcome to America.
13Very powerful, very beautiful.
thank you.
14I’m only too aware of the bigotry in others. Thanks for the reminder that I need to shed mine, too. Good message for the season — or for any time.
15Wonderful. Thank you. I know many who share that philosophy. I am not sure I want to expand the lesson to myself, though; I would rather dump a couple of trucksfull of sand on Trump. He has scared the last shred of sense out of some American grains and they are dangerous.
16Speaking of perspective, Gary Leupp knows how to ask the relevant questions:
“Isn’t it obvious that the news anchor really needs to ask, not why some Muslim can “become radicalized” and kill innocent civilians in western cities—as though this were some sort of inscrutable moral riddle—but why U.S. leaders can sleep soundly as their death machines rain down “shock and awe” on Muslim peoples in wars based on lies guaranteed to spawn simmering time bombs like Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik?”
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/12/08/the-basics-of-islamist-terrorist-ideology/
17Excellent tale of humanity.
Thank you.
18Darn cool expository writing!
For a long while I felt as if I was the only one on Planet E who was raised to be essential but decent about it. I rather think social networking had a lot to do with what I see as a huge crack up of human behavior and aspirations.
19To expand upon the grain of sand imagery….
Astronomers wondered what would happen if they pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at an unremarkable bit of apparently dark sky and left it there for quite a while. They took 342 exposures over ten days and combined the light from all of them. What they got was this, called the Hubble Deep Field:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5f/HubbleDeepField.800px.jpg/1045px-HubbleDeepField.800px.jpg
Only a few of those spots of light, the ones with multiple “twinkly” lines coming off them, are stars. All the rest are galaxies. Galaxies like our Milky Way Galaxy, maybe bigger, with hundreds of millions of stars in each of them. Each of those little dots is a galaxy.
Where does the grain of sand come in? The area of sky in that photo is about the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length. So multiply that grain by the 360° of space in all directions all around the Earth’s globe to get a vague notion of the number of galaxies in the universe, not counting the ones too far away for us to see.
I don’t know why astronomers don’t walk around in a permanent state of bogglement. I certainly boggle every time I see or think of this photo, and similar ones taken since.
So if you want to know how you stack up, think of the Hubble Deep Field.
On the other hand, of all the planets circling all the stars in all those billions of galaxies, this planet is the only one we know of (so far) that contains life. So it would be nice if we’d stop screwing that up.
20That is so brilliant if actually left me in tears
21Rhea-Planet E is the only known source of puppies.
22e platypus….it’s also the only known source of chocolate. I consider both essential.
23Ah, puppies, especially my 13 year old pup. My happy place of refuge and escape from rwnjs.
24Been doing a lot of spiritual studying for awhile now.I recently began reading Juanita Jean’ regularily. This clinches it!
25All I need to do is read Juanita Jean and her friends for what I am looking for. Also laugh more.
Puppies, kittens and children upstage the best of the acting world. Chocolate and desserts are good, too. Love does make the world go around.
As so many of you said in the 60s: “make love not war.” That’s a sentiment worthy of making the 21st century the best ever for ourselves and our beloved planet.
26Primo, you wrote lovely imagery for our individual places in human existence. Rhea, yours of us in the universe is wonderful too. BTW, whenever I think about the minute speck I am in that universe, I am boggled and totally gabberflasted down to my tiniest, most insignificant atom.
I am engaged in an email conversation with a good and very smart friend about a similar philosophic topic and it’s a lot of fun.
We truly are sand, even on our very best days, yet we have the power to make a difference for a few other grains of sand. All of our sister and brother grains bear the same responsibility. Our greatest duty is to avoid forking that up.
27I used to work at a major university, where arrogance is actively bred and supported. Above my desk I had two signs:
There are 6 billion people on this planet. Most of them don’t know who you are.
and
The entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others.
28Thank You.
29With your permission, I would like to repost this wonderful essay to my friends.
30Certainly, Linda! All my scribblings and maunderings here are free for anyone to share -with attribution, please, as Primo – in the marketplace of ideas. And thank you all for the kind words.
31http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/world/europe/donald-trump-muslims-british-petition.html?_r=0
The English have a petition to keep the Donald out of their country. Everyone should sign it.
32Wow.
33Profound and beautiful.
EPO
34re:Gene Pitney
Boy, THAT one sure never made it to the Top 40!
I suspect any airplay at all would have resulted in riots in the streets. From Christians and Muslims alike.