Heroes Not Zombies

Water fascinates me. I guess it fascinates a lot of us. Little children love playing with water, don’t they?

What caught my eye here was the shape of the water. This isn’t such an unusual sight. We often see sparkling lenses and jewels on leaves and petals, don’t we?

Water has an astonishing ability to take shape. At first it seems as if the shape is determined by the leaf….in other words, the water simply fills the space into which it has fallen. A different shaped leaf would have created a different shaped drop of water. But when you look a little more closely you can see that part of the shape is formed by the water itself. Can you see how the droplet curves down towards the leaf on all sides? It’s the surface tension between the water molecules themselves which creates this lens like shape.

When I look closely at this I get to thinking about the shape of a human life. I know we can describe a life through story but there’s another way of imagining someone’s life as a sort of three dimensional chart, moving forwards through time, leaving a trail of memories and impressions, filled with highs and lows, twists and turns, sometimes glowing with vibrant colours and light, yet in other places, dark, sombre and somewhat flat.

I often wonder about the shape of a human life and how, like water, that shape is created by place, environment and circumstances but also by a person’s inner qualities, values and thoughts.