You're the only one

You pause, you kneel, you watch

“What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Have you ever watched a grasshopper or a cricket or a spider.

Or ants? I love watching ants. But a grasshopper is a better example because they're so detailed. Stop and watch one sitting on that stalk of grass, it's going to jump in a second, any second now but for a few seconds it's you and this grasshopper and it has perfect little legs with perfect little pointy bends for jumping and it has three dots in a row on each of its legs and this grasshopper is so much like every other grasshopper but it's the only one that is THIS one.

And it may be, in fact it's likely, that you are the only human who will ever take a few seconds to kneel down and be still and look at this particular grasshopper.

Not that it cares. It's going to jump now — there it goes — and you'll never see it again and it maybe didn't even notice you, or didn't notice you as more than a giant shadow, a large moving presence, a potential danger. Maybe it thought you were a bird at first when your shadow fell close and it almost jumped then but you knelt instead of diving and you breathed soft instead of chirping or screeching and so it stayed for a moment on the stalk of grass.

Off it goes, goodbye grasshopper, have a nice life, hope you don't get eaten by a bird today.

Maybe you’re the only person to notice this particular grasshopper, and it's gone and no other grasshopper just like it will ever exist and you’re the one who got to see it. You.

That's a good day. That's a worthwhile way to spend a moment or a life, I think. Seeing things that exist right now in this particular form, for this moment, that will be washed away with the night or the decade or the generation. But here they are right now for you to notice and wonder at and think, How odd, how wild, how wonderful, how unlikely that we would be alive together in this moment and come across each other.

You’re the only one of you.

And whether life is a series of destiny-driven encounters with purposefully beautifully connected patterns, or meaningless tumbles in the ultimate darkness of an infinitely random universe,

You’re the only one of you.

🎧 Here’s a groove you can hang out in.