Counting Tomorrows

“Forty-one, forty-two, forty” … “yes, forty-three. What difference does it make how many steps lead up to the church. Or how many steps it is to the market, or the shed? Why do you do that? You know people look at you like you are mad. Counting out loud, they can hear you, you know.

I know you mean no harm, but it is embarrassing. People look, they point, they whisper, and you go on as if you are the only one in the world, and that it matters that there are forty-three steps to climb to get to the church doors. Or that it takes thirty-two steps to get from the kitchen to the bathroom upstairs. What difference would it make if it were twenty steps or forty-four. The purpose is to get where you are going, not how many steps it takes to get there.”

“Maybe not to you, but to me it means everything. The world was created from Chaos. God created the universe because he could. But then, after the explosion, He recognized that order was necessary. Not only necessary but imperative if life was to evolve. Stumbling around in the chaos, was not going to make life possible. Knowing that there are forty-three steps to the climb to the church reassures me that there is a plan, hope. That chaos is no longer dictating life. Can’t you see that?”

“I understand what you are saying, but your counting, your note taking, your recoding everything, creates chaos. Can’t you see that? People are afraid of you.”

I know I don’t understand, nor does he. I believe it has something to do with being orphaned. Losing his family in the war, loosing hope, losing the reason and will to live. His counting I believe, gives him the reassurance that he will not just float away. That his God will not pluck him from the earth and send him into space where he will drift alone. He is afraid of being alone. I’m sure that is why he captures everything, even if symbolically in his mind. It frees him somehow from the fear of not belonging.

I do not pretend to know what it feels like to be that alone. If I found myself that alone I would want to hold on to anything, everything, and document everything I did also. 

How long it takes to get someplace, how many steps, yards, feet, inches, it takes to reach that destination. He does that you know. He calculates the distance, and then converts it into all the variables. He says to, “better understand.” I ask him what, but he does not answer. He told me if I didn’t know, he couldn’t explain it.

He tells me there are only 26 letters in the alphabet. Twenty-six he says, is not enough. “Yes, they gave us the lower case to make it look like we have more, but we don’t. It is like looking in the mirror with one eye closed,” he says. “It limits the possibilities we are meant to experience if we are ever to be more than suggestions of what we were meant to be. Wars, famine, greed, hate, lust, envy, all the marvels of being human rolled into life. There has to be more.

Do you see birds arguing over the rent? The price of tea, or a bunch of carrots? No! They are content to live and die attempting to live, but that is all. I believe God did not go to all the trouble to create us and then just abandon us to our own devices. We are animals after all. And we all know what animals do, and how they do it. The only difference between us and the other species is our brains, and the capability of exploring the possibilities it provides us. A chicken only cares about finding the next thing to eat. We have to be more than that. Counting, documenting is the way we accomplish that. By documenting what works, what doesn’t, how it works. How many steps it takes to get to the upstairs is essential if we are to understand our role in life. Can’t you see that?” he says looking at me with that intensity that makes me turn away.

I can’t see it. It makes no sense. Documenting everything is somehow making us better than a chicken? I don’t need to be able to count, to know I’m better than a chicken. But there is no use in arguing with him. He refuses to believe God has abandoned us. Left us to decide whether life is worth living or whether it is all just an experiment He is playing to see how we will react. I don’t see how a God could be so calculating as to do such a thing. But he says that is the purpose of the experiment. To see if we can distinguish between what is truly right and what we imagine is right. 

Then out of nowhere he yells, “Come here, come here!” He’s so excited. I had never seen him so excited. It is like he has discovered some miracle.  He now somehow understands the virgin birth, or the resurrection. 

When I get there he’s got this jar turned upside down and beneath the jar on the table, is a bee. I can hear the buzzing. The jar magnifies the sound. It sounds like there are a dozen bees inside. Then he says, “I’ve discovered why it matters.” I have no idea what he is talking about. Then he says, “Don’t you see, the bee only knows the world it is in. If you reduce the size of its world, you decrease its ability to go beyond the limits of its confinement. It is not that it can’t get through the glass, how to, is it possible? That thought never occurs to it. We are like that. We imprison ourselves with all these notions that we can or can’t do this or that, and that becomes the parameters of our world. 

What if we are told the glass around us is keeping us prisoner, and we refuse to believe it. It is then that we are free. Otherwise life is little more than escaping one glass cage after another until we no longer have the strength to continue. I believe that is what God intends us to realize. We are only as restricted as we choose to be. Belief is the answer to all our problems. We just simply believe they can be overcome, and they will be.”

I watched as he walked out of the door, down the forty-three steps to the street, and disappeared around the corner. I never saw him again. Do you suppose he could be right, and the bee and the rest of the world can be wrong? Or are we to spend our lives looking for a way out of the jar. I don’t know any longer. I just want the buzzing to stop.