Home


The Last Inspirational Email Forward

--Written 1/15/2006 by the maintainer of the Larch Web site.

One doesn't want to hurt people's feelings, but enough is enough...  



The Last Inspirational Email Forward

Dear Ones,

I have read in your borrowed forwards of "specialness", that we are all special and valuable, unique and loved, wonderful and very dear.  A glow of appreciation follows the receipt of such a message, and I confess that I have basked in it -- briefly.

Then, my odd sort of specialness wonders that this message is invariably sent to a slew of people -- all special, all wonderful.  How is this?  Is specialness a group characteristic? I wonder.  No, surely not.  To be special must refer to the individual alone.  Or...?  If everyone is special, (loved, dear, etc.) then the concept of specialness is strained -- how can everyone be special, except to himself or herself? 

Does it mean each person is equally valuable and worthwhile?  To whom?  Let's leave God out of this thought on the reasonable basis that no one speaks for God or has a genuine understanding of His nature.  But wait, perhaps that is what the original message was asserting, possibly without realizing it.  Hmm, that makes some sense.  If we assume that the individual human contains doubts about his or her worth, then God can be invoked as a universal validater of worth, thus canceling these doubts (which continue to arise anyway).

So, perhaps we now understand the nature of this sort of forward:  it is a religious statement designed to recall to a mass of people, that though they are mere members of a mass and therefore small, there is an Entity greater than man, than the Earth even, that bears the burden of attention on each human (and sparrow as it falls, but let us ignore this).

Okay, so each person has a need to feel special, and be attended to continuously.  Yet we communicate through mass emailings that contradict the specialness that is asserted.  If each of us were indeed special, then we would receive individual emails that are unique to our specialness, would we not?  There is something cosmically ironic about a mass message that asserts an individual specialness, unless it were specifically a religious message.  But down on the plane of ordinary life, amid family and friends, let us give up these mass messages that only increase our loneliness, while glossing us over with religiosity.

Is it not true that sending these mass messages is superficial?  Do we not slight our friends and family when we send these things, but ask nothing of a particular pilgrim in the journey of life, that say nothing of what is in our hearts?

But people are busy these days, I hear.  Whether busy or not, they certainly feel rushed and cut off from their inner life by the compulsive need to respond to stimuli, however meaningless the stimuli are.  It is these stimuli that are passed on.  Everything is like the question: "How about them (Yankees, Reds, Bruins, etc.)?"  So people do not communicate well because they have little that has been converted into themselves for that takes time and attention and patience.  So, anxious to be attuned to the global village, there is no time left for the self (the special self, remember?).

Our situation, whether we like it or not is this, so I think:

Q: Where did we come from?
A: We are children of the universe.

Q: Why are we here?
A: Wrong question.  Life did not derive from purpose --  it is the creator of purpose.

Q: Where are we going?
A: Materially, we stay on Earth forever, our atoms remain.  The unique part of us vanishes like a bubble.  Being unique, it can never come again.  Deal with this hard fact.  It surely takes maturity to see the real nature of the specialness of those who live, while they live.  The time is now.  Later is too late.

You don't like this?  Then think, or delude, as you want; you will anyway.  Just try to remember there is no reason to think that the universe is so arranged that all desires are satisfied.  Some courage may be called for.

As to our specialness, yes, each of us is special to our individual selves.  And we are special to those that really know us and care about us.  Odysseus' dog recognized him after twenty years when no one else did.  The dog cared.  Finally, each of us is unique -- the very essence of specialness.

And a final notion: we are a branch of the great apes -- an honorable line of primates -- and our heritage is one of survival these hundreds of millions of years.  It is a tough school from which we shall never graduate.  We are kin to all life.

Where did we get the idea that we had to be special to the universe?  And so very special, that we had the right to mangle all the rest of creation into whatever form needed to satisfy our every whim.  We kill, not just individual creatures, but torture them wholesale and commit genocide on them.  This is not the act of a divine being, but a depraved one.  We fold our highest aspirations onto our basest proclivities.  We glorify war as noble, however ignoble the causes and the effects.  We are not only "a little lower than the angels", but only a little higher than the inhabitants of Bedlam.

So it goes...