I have too much love to be housed in one person. It envelops the whole world I think, every leaf, every stem, every petal; every smile, every folly, every secret shadow. People are endlessly complex and sometimes I estimate them wrong, but their motivations are nearly always within my grasp. In this grand theatre of life, I have only recently become a participant; often I have been a timorous spectator, timorous but greedy, devouring everything I see, storing it away like a magpie.
Why is it that our struggles fill me with sorrow but not pessimism? Why does the endless repetition of our historical tragedies, engendered by the same faults, bigotry, and willful blindness, not fill me with cynicism? Why, instead, does the relentless passage of the Wheel of Time, at a scale far greater than any one individual life, provide a succour hard to convey with words?
It is this: we are and we are not. We matter, and we don’t. We exist like a splash in a pond, briefly impactful, announcing our presence, yet indistinguishable from the innumerable drops in the pond in a microsecond. Were we even to matter for an instant in the scheme of the pond, why, the pond is nothing. What is the pond next to the ocean?
And thus our insignificance liberates us to love, to live, to care about the minutiae of our lives. To be kind, to be extravagantly generous, to express freely, to give of our spirit, for what does it cost us?
Only everything, and nothing.
Call a Rose a Rose 