Look Up

Watching the grains of sand fall through the neck of an hourglass is hypnotic. 

Below, a mini-mountain of sand slowly builds – an ever growing indication of time past.   

Above, the supply of grains that have yet to fall is slowly depleting – grains of future time.  And when the last grain falls through the narrow neck of the hourglass – what we might think of as “now” - that’s it.  Time’s up. 

But what might the grains of sand represent?  Seconds, minutes and hours of course – that’s how you know when your egg is properly cooked, or the exam is over.  We can also think of them as strides in a marathon or strokes in a rowing race.  Or heartbeats?  Perhaps the grain representing our last heartbeat is already there in the hourglass of our lives, patiently waiting its turn to fall.

But what if the sand grains represent dreams?  More accurately hopes and dreams.  When that last grain of hope, or that last glimmer of a dream drops through the neck of our hourglass, what then?  No more hope?  No more dreams?

For some of us, it can sometimes seem that way.  

Beneath us lies a pile of broken shards, pieces of dreams that once glittered in the sunlight of our future.  Beside them are our deflated hopes, now lacking the energy and bounce that kept them aloft. 

And above us, the empty void.  Life, and even time itself, has ceased to have meaning. 

But we are drawn to keep looking back at the pile below, where we can see that among the shattered dreams and deflated hopes, there are also spiky little “what ifs”, and long slippery “if onlys”.  And they’re still alive. They’re not a pretty sight, but we can’t look away.

It takes too much energy to look away.

But look away we must, if we are to kill those demons.  And not just away, but up.  Up into the “future” of the hourglass, because there something miraculous is happening. 

Once we’ve made the choice to look up, it becomes clear that the future is no longer empty. (Perhaps it never was – it just seemed that way).  Now it’s filling with new hopes and new dreams, ideally suited to the new you.

The you that chose to look up.