Overlap

Dear reader,



I love long car rides, don't you? I wonder if this is a result of my family's annual pilgrimage to our longhouse each Christmas. Talk about long car rides. It takes about 15 hours by car, give or take a few hours for pit stops and dilly-dallying. And that's only after they fixed up the roads. We used to have to go by the muddy logging roads, quite an experience. One on occasion, one of my uncles was driving us. He insisted on skidding the car sideways on every time the road sloped downhill, causing me and my three siblings to squeal in delight and mock fright. And before there were even any roads connecting the cities to my longhouse, we had to go by express boat. I remember playing with my siblings while we waited for the express to arrive; hopping around in the black river mud pretending to be mudskippers. I loved it when I would hop a particularly large hop, and the suction from the mud would suck my slippers clean off my feet. Well, in a manner of speaking. There was nothing even remotely clean where the mudskipper game was concerned. If you managed to stay clean after a round of mudskipper, you weren't doing it properly.

I just realized how old I sound. "Why, back in my day..." Or perhaps it's just because Sarawak is actually a very young state. We're only about 47 years old, after all. We're a baby compared to other countries and states in the world. In the 19 years I've been alive, we've gone from express boats, to muddy logging roads, to proper tar and cement roads--albeit with gigantic potholes from logging trucks passing through. Pretty impressive, if you ask me.

Anyway. Back to the topic of long drives. The reason I love car rides is it gives you time to think. To sit down, be quiet, stare off into space, and just think. So I was being driven home one day, by my driving instructor, ironically. In the midst of my sitting and staring and thinking, I happened to look up out the window, and I saw an aeroplane. Or airplane. Whatever. It was flying relatively low, low enough for me to see the details on the underside of it as it passed overhead, but you still had to squint a little to see them clearly. And it got me thinking:

How many people are on that plane?
Are they looking down out of their windows, the same way I was looking up out of mine?
Can they see the car I was riding in, or was it lost in a swarm of other cars, milling about the winding streets like ants in an ant farm?
What were they thinking about as they gazed out of their windows? About the ant-sized people in their ant-sized cars, perhaps?
For every woman on that plane, there is a daughter. A sister. A mother. A wife. A grandmother.
And for every man; a son. A brother. A father. A husband. A grandfather.
For every person; a cousin, an uncle, a lover, a teacher.
Each person; a soul.
A life.
A story to tell.

Then the plane flew over the car, and out of sight.

Honestly. Why is it there are such selfish people in the world? How can someone live their lives in a bubble when every minute of every day, our lives overlap with the lives of the people next to us?

I don't know. This 'lives overlapping' thing seems to be a recurring theme to me. I think about it all the time. It's comforting, I suppose, in a vague way. It means that we're never truly alone in the world. Whatever we've been through, no matter how embarrassing or degrading or seemingly insurmountable it may be, someone else in some other corner of the world has probably gone through far worse at some point in history. The elasticity and endurance of the human spirit, and all that. On the other hand, it's also awesomely humbling. We realize that, in the grand scheme of things, considering the Universe and everything in existence, we're nothing but cosmic ants. Busy, busy, busy living our lives, running here and there, helter-skelter. All the while some higher power--the One who gives and takes away--is watching us, loving us, judging us. Compared to Him, we're nothing but stars in the sky. Grains of sand on the shore. Ashes blowing in the wind.

And...I'm officially out of metaphors.

I should go to bed now, I suppose. I really need to start sleeping like a normal human being again, instead of some nocturnal creature. Til next time, dear reader, I remain...




Yours,


Figgy; Found in Faith, Lost in Thought