Last night my son and I took turns reading short stories before bedtime, as is our longstanding ritual. We'd finished The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy last year, and needed some lighter fare.
We're currently halfway through a book of folk tales from around the world. I received it as a gift from a third grade student's parents (my college job was as a Sunday School teacher) when my stubble was less flecked with gray. One of last night's stories resonated.
In the early times, humans were constantly worried about death. They were so deeply preoccupied that they could barely eat. This angered the worms, who decided to petition the supreme being.
"You promised us meat, but humans are nothing but skin and bones when they are buried." The being mulled it over, and decided they were right, so the being created money.
Now humans were constantly preoccupied with how much money they were making, whether they had enough of it, how they could make more of it, where they planned to spend it.
They spent great sums of money on feasts and grew fat, and the worms were happy.
Two things struck me about the parable. The first, of course, was the tremendous distraction that money provides.
The second is how that distraction can take us away from asking those more important questions by becoming our main focus. Given the reality of death and the finite nature of our lifespans, what questions should we spend our time asking and answering? What efforts will impart the value and meaning we seek to superimpose on our lives?
Comments 1
The age old question of existence: are you a human being or a human doing? In old days, it was strongly skewed to doing because as you like to say entropy or better neg-entropy ruled one’s existence. Community existed because without it entropy would rule err ruin your day.
Today we are drowning in luxury. So much luxury we dare to engage in silly political narrative in the face of a pandemic which is the very definition of entropy playing out in one’s life. We crow and huff about social distancing. Social distancing has got us 1/4 of the infections in the world and 23% of the world’s deaths, but the mantra exists and is repeated, as if social distancing matters and somehow affords control over entropy. Such is the nature of luxury. On every front it blinds one to the truth.
Entropy is the ultimate driver of the embedding of the virus into humanity? When mixing between humanity and virus reaches its maxima, entropy reaches its maxima, and herd immunity is achieved. At that point the new world order will be revealed and those that positioned wisely will continue in luxury. Wonder if worms get Covid? Could God be getting his revenge against worm ingratitude by turning humanity into a weapon of worm destruction? Why do worms get a pass on the tyranny of entropy?