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Clayton and I were standing outside my apartment on a quiet, peaceful, snowy December night about four years ago. The snowflakes that fell around us were big and airy, almost ethereal, as they blanketed the world around us in a covering of unblemished snow. There was no wind that night, so the snow floated calmly and lightly as the streetlights illuminated each falling flake against the backdrop of a clear black sky.
As we talked about particulars of theology and ecclesiology and philosophy and the latest Magic: the Gathering cards, I felt one snowflake land on my cheek. It was big and puffy, and I could feel it melt as soon as it touched my skin. The water ran down my face, and that's when my mind began wandering. I thought about my snowflake, and I imagined time going in reverse. The water on my face crystallized into the snowflake form once again, and gently rose up, back to the sky, back to the clouds. I saw my snowflake floating upwards. I marveled at the details of its design, and the sublimity of nature and the cosmos evident even in such small and finite things. I then understood: this finite existence - an occurrence in a moment in time and then gone - made my snowflake even more beautiful. Indeed, my snowflake reminded me of the significance of time. Once it's gone, we don't get it back.
My snowflake finished its journey upward, rejoining its kin of cloud droplets. I thought about the molecules and atoms that made up my snowflake. Where have they been? I watched time continue to travel in reverse. The clouds carried my snowflake back from whence it came. I saw the clouds travel over the land and to the sea. I saw my snowflake falling to the earth, as a drop of rain, as a pellet of hail, and then make its way back to the sky as vapor. I saw my snowflake swim in the ocean, and wondered whether a tiny part of the Atlantic found its way from the coast to my cheek. I watched as my snowflake travelled across the water, to places I've never seen, encountering people I've never met. I watched rain fall on children playing in the street in Dublin as my snowflake landed in a puddle as a splash of water. I witnessed my snowflake spend some time as fog in a valley in Spain. It even became a snowflake once again, this time landing in the hair of a woman in Stockholm as she was walking home at night.
Time continued to go backwards. Where has my snowflake been? I watched it take many forms in several places: as a tear streaming from the eye of a young Jewish man imprisoned at Auschwitz; frozen into the Iceberg that sank the Titanic; as a bead of sweat that formed on the brow of John Wilkes Booth right before he shot Lincoln; as part of the water Jesus used to wash the feet of his disciples; as a splash of water from the Gulf of Malia during the battle of Thermopylae; intermingled with the hemlock given to Socrates to drink after he was sentenced to death; as rain falling on the back of a Tyrannosaurus rex as it chased after its prey.
Time stopped, then fast-forwarded back to that moment when my snowflake hit my face. I saw where it had been, and pondered where it would go from here. My snowflake's journey reminded me that we are all connected. Each of us. All of humanity. And not just in the present. Our decisions and actions have an effect not only on other people around us now, but on people we may never meet, whose existence may not even begin until long after ours have ended. My snowflake reminded me that we are all part of the same world. Our differences have become boundaries only because we made them so. Our prejudice and hatred of each other stems from our ignorance of the fact that we are all kinfolk, and we all share the same planet as our home. We share this one world as our home. We do not realize how our actions and words can have a ripple effect on those around us, and even on those far from us.
Almost a year after that night, I heard the words of Neil deGrasse Tyson: "We are all connected; To each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe atomically." Naturally, my mind wandered back to my snowflake. I couldn't help but wonder where it is now.
The choice is with us still, but the civilization now in jeopardy is all humanity. As the ancient myth makers knew, we are children equally of the earth and the sky. In our tenure on this planet we've accumulated dangerous evolutionary baggage — propensities for aggression and ritual, submission to leaders, hostility to outsiders — all of which puts our survival in some doubt. But we've also acquired compassion for others, love for our children and desire to learn from history and experience, and a great soaring passionate intelligence — the clear tools for our continued survival and prosperity. Which aspects of our nature will prevail is uncertain, particularly when our visions and prospects are bound to one small part of the small planet Earth. But up there in the immensity of the Cosmos, an inescapable perspective awaits us. There are not yet any obvious signs of extraterrestrial intelligence and this makes us wonder whether civilizations like ours always rush implacably, headlong, toward self-destruction. National boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth from space. Fanatical ethnic or religious or national chauvinisms are a little difficult to maintain when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars. Travel is broadening. - Carl Sagan
