The Human Sundial

There’s an old game I played while on long trips as a kid. I would lie my head sideways and look out the window, and try to forget that I was moving across a fixed landscape in a car. I imagined the car and I were “really” stationary, and that I was floating between the sky on my left and the giant spinning disc of the world on my right. Because, see, most everything is a matter of perspective. Maybe I never moved all day long: maybe I stayed in the same place, and when I thought I was walking or driving, I was pushing the world underneath me and around me like a giant three-dimensional treadmill. Maybe I’ve never moved from the same spot my whole entire life. It sure feels that way sometimes. Again, maybe it’s just perspective that makes me feel as though the only real difference in my life between 7am and 7pm on any given day is the direction of the shadow I cast. Change perspective only a little, like an Escher drawing, and I suddenly I shift from being an extra crawling around like a bug on a vast stage to being the center of the world that can do nothing but hover in place and manipulate his own face and limbs to handle whatever the machine of the universe is throwing his way at the moment. Does that sound proud? It shouldn’t, at all. It should make you excited in the way you used to be when you were learning to play a new game. And it should give you a better idea of how those people think who say the universe is God, because although they may not be strictly right, you begin to see how the motions of everything-else-but-you and the will of God are not really separate things anymore.