We Are Nothing in This World

Just Another Grain of Sand… Ruminations From The Mountain

Think of this for a moment. Imagine having lived a life devoid of friends. Now in your ‘60s and ‘70s, the life you chose is littered with past opportunities, past attempts by others to know you, to understand you, to befriend you… even to love you. You eschewed them all for reasons you don’t care to remember.

Now the only view afforded you of your life is one of a darkened empty street, a cold fall wind tossing dead leaves from the few remaining trees, loose garbage, empty McDonald’s bags, and unread newspapers blowing from the unkempt yards of run-down, wooden houses. A view as depressing as what your life has become.

Why? You have no answers. Those who know you, your family… no one knows why. You have reached the point, beyond the apex of life, where you simply sit sucking on another Marlboro, TV blaring, looking out the window at the darkening and depressing scene with anxiety and anger, alone.

We, humans, are social animals. As we grow from little tykes to adults, as we meander through life meeting people and making both friends and enemies, we sometimes lose sight of what life is, should be and can be. We sometimes fail to understand the effect of all of those people in our life as well as your effect upon the lives of others.

Every person and every experience in your life is who you are now and is what made you who you are now. Life is like a stream of water winding its way down the mountain to the rivers, the fields, the lakes… meandering to somewhere its’ only purpose, but to where we never know. Just as this meandering stream changes course on its’ long trip, so do our lives.

The importance of recognizing the effect of people on our lives is possibly our biggest challenge in life. When we look back, we hopefully understand that we too have had an effect on hundreds if not thousands of people in our life’s journey. If a goal in life could be one thing, it should be that we have had a lasting effect for the good in someone’s life and that we have an untold number of chances to take advantage of this.

If we can enter the remaining chapters of our life knowing we have left people, possibly hundreds to thousands of people whose lives have crossed ours, with a smile or a great memory, something for which they will remember you … If we succeed at that then our life was a success. It is then we become immortal.

But, without acknowledging the changes in our lives and those who brought about those changes, good and bad, you will be left alone with no friends and no memories of any consequence, no acceptance or understanding of who and why you are who you are, and how you arrived there.

It is those who were your bump in the road, those who were the rocks creating the rapids through which you flowed… who helped you define you and provided you the opportunity to constantly re-define who you are. Like that stream flowing down the mountain, we are constantly changing paths, always redefining who we are whether we want to or not.

By rejecting or ignoring this, then you are truly alone. Never will you be immortal. You are nothing in this world. You are simply just another grain of sand.