The Sand Castle

During my vacation at the beach, I’d encountered a scene that reminded me of a basic truth that I’d believed and hold in life. I was sitting on a chair at the beach at that time still deciding when it will be the best time to go for a swim when I noticed a young girl digging up wet sand and filling up her bucket, continually pressing the sand to compact it. It turns out that she was trying to build up a sand structure using the bucket as the mold. She was probably trying to build a sand castle but I knew better that with the tools she have and her skills, she could never build one. She was pretty patient and quite determined I would say in trying to build something. I’d decided right then to postpone my swim and observe the future civil engineer on what she is doing. As I was observing, I wondered. “What is she doing anyway?” “ What purpose do she want to achieve?” Not that she is a lousy sand castle builder but rather it is because sooner or later the sand castle or whatever sand structure she is building would be ruined either by the beach participants or the wave. It just doesn’t make sense to me to do something so futile and fleeting. Then, I realized that everyday, each one of us tries to build a sand castle. A monument of our existence and achievement whether physical or intangible but only a very small fraction of our monument could stand the test of time and not washed away or ruined by others. Talk about futility of life and smallness of human. I’m not a man of religion however I can’t help but wonder about the teachings of religion on the futility of our existence. Buddhism would say that all our effort would be meaningless by the time of our death and in a hundred years time, everything we knew would be in ashes. The solution, meditate and withdraw so that once your turn is up for recycling, you won’t end up in the misery that is human life and join the great nirvana so to speak. Christianity on the other hand believes in “from dust we came till dust we return”. We all just lived on borrowed time and everything we build is meaningless if not made for God the creator. Same goes with Islam and Judaism I presumed. Life is so short and meaningless as it so seemed. It is then that I remembered my thermodynamics class in college. Specifically, I remembered the class lecture on the compressed gas piston – cylinder engine. The gas expands when heated to move the piston up the cylinder doing useful work lets say in turning the wheel. Once the heat is remove, the gas contracts and the piston is lowered back to its original position. I remember my professor said that it doesn’t matter whether the piston is back to its original position and doesn’t change its position at all (From zero to 1 and back to zero again). What matters is that it does work in turning the wheel. It also doesn’t matter it take 1 second or almost eternity to make the moves, what matter is that it does the work. Life too is the same. It doesn’t matter that it will be ruined eventually or that we eventually die or that we return to dust from which we are supposed to be made from. Life is the process from moving one point to the other and back again if it is so. It is the journey from birth till death. We learned, we grow, we experienced joy and happiness, we shed tears. Can we say nothing has changed since our existence? Life is not the tombstone where only the date of birth and the date of death are written. Life is everything that happened between birth and death. Is this futile? It doesn’t matter if there is no monument of our existence as long as we lived life and enjoyed it. Besides, I don’t believe that human existence is futile. We may achieve no lasting monument on our own but we can pass our knowledge and experience to the next person in line and that we will be remembered for. It if were not for this, I wouldn’t be writing this nor would we leave the cave where we are born. As I was contemplating this, the little girl left her sand castle and gone for the swim and I too think that I should be swimming and enjoy life as well. LIVE LONG AND ENJOY. “ )