Seeking Answers Beyond the "World"

You are a single grain of sand within an inverted hourglass.

At the instant of inversion, you begin your descent alongside the multitude. In the world of sand, all directions ultimately converge upon that solitary bottleneck. The deeper you go, the tighter the embrace of the crowd becomes.

At first, you could wander the flat expanse at the summit; later, you could only slide along the slanted glass walls; and in the end, nothing remains before you but the bottleneck. Deprived even of the hesitation between "Yes" or "No," amidst the shoving and the coercion, you are forced to choose the inevitable "Yes." And so, squeezed into a slender thread, you fall into the depths.

Within the lifespan of the hourglass, a grain of sand will live this life many times over. The process may vary, the timing of the fall may differ, but the beginning is identical, and the ending is the same.

As a grain of sand, does there come a day when you tire of it all? Weary of the trajectory that no amount of maneuvering can alter? Weary of the crowding that inevitably squeezes through the neck? This weariness did not grant you escape, yet it turned your gaze elsewhere—because you are not in the center, but at the edge, pressed against the transparent glass wall, seeing the "Outside."

Through the glass shell of the hourglass, you behold a stretch of sandy beach. It turns out that the same sand can cycle back and forth within an hourglass, or it can drift through the world with the ocean spray! You see the reefs upon the beach, and faintly, slowly, you recall: amidst the ebb and flow, the sun and moon, the wind and snow of tens of millions of years, you were not always this sand pacing back and forth in a glass vessel. You were the reef—standing on the shore, weathering the wind and rain. You were the mountain rock—the first to feel the warmth of the morning sun. You were even the embers following a supernova explosion in the cosmic wilderness, amidst a curtain of stars.

It turns out that the origin of your life was once so radiant, so earth-shattering.

You gradually realize that what truly distresses you is not the narrowing choices or the daily repetition. What distresses you is flowing Time, and the heart eroded by it. It is Time—gravity dragging you from the stars to the ground to become a rock on the mountain. It is Time—heat and cold, rain and snow, softening your once-hard interior; when the primordial energy was worn away, flowing water pushed you to remain on a tidal flat. It is Time—tides and gales constantly eroding your exterior, until the last shred of hardness was ground down, and you became one of ten thousand broken grains on that beach, scooped up by a child into a funnel, beginning this "World" that believes itself eternal and cyclical—a "World" where "falling" is the only truth.

You have clarified two things: There is no exit to be found spinning in this daily cycle; and what delivered you here is Time—that once-vast self, hidden by Time within this minuscule shell.

"Time, ah, time…" Just as you are thinking this, a crisp snap rings in your ear. The little master has accidentally broken a glass cup. Shards scatter across the floor, glittering and bright.

The hourglass remains unscathed, yet you smile. You no longer rush to maneuver within the "inevitability" of the fall, but instead, press yourself gently against the wall of the hourglass. You look at the fragments on the floor and think: Time can grind down rocks, it can shatter that cup, and naturally, one day it will shatter this glass that imprisons you.

Now, you need only wait. Wait for the moment the shell disintegrates. Wait for a gust of wind to blow toward the pile of sand once the walls are gone.

"At least, I will not be like them," you think to yourself. "Even if the glass shatters, they will likely not remember that beyond flowing up and down, life holds another possibility: to ride the wind."