[every 18 seconds] #onthemove

There's this statistic we use with the Red Bus Project. It doesn't really change your life.

At least, it didn't change mine. At first.

@redbusproject

That was before our director poured out an entire gallon of milk in front of a highschool classroom. I was standing against the back wall, figuring I knew the discussion he was about to give to these youngsters. Oh, silly youngster myself. It took him 18 seconds to empty that gallon. 16 cups of smooth, skim milk from a plastic container flowing into a bucket. The silence sank around us as candy wrappers, backpacks and the number of pens sitting by the white board which I had been assessing almost became obsolete.

Every 18 seconds, somewhere in the world, a child becomes an orphan without a mother or a father.

About as long as it took me to write that last sentence.

It's a statistic in a line of statistics that can be pulled from all corners and public squares of knowledge. But there's something in the physical representation of passing time which causes you to stop chewing at your gum for a moment and watch what's unfolding in the rest of civilization. That's what it did to me. We take common groceries and attach to them the weight of over 140 million abandoned children, and oddly, it makes sense. Taking something we know well and using it to communicate things we know little about. People don't associate with statistics because they don't mean much, usually. Statistics are as common as refreshing our newsfeeds and they're usually being replaced by bigger and worse statistics, and eventually, we lose interest or become too jaded to notice.

18 seconds. No one pays attention to the passing of 18 seconds and so its worth is lost. We watch 6-second vines and 2-minute microwave popcorn and tutorials on how to create a smokey eye in 15-minutes or less. But within all those, the mundane 18 seconds is lost.

We're not in the business of shock value. But it shocked me, and I've been the one folding tee-shirts in the merch closet with that very phrase printed across the front. I helped place the order for more. I've been staring at #every18seconds on Instagram and listening to strategies of gaining leverage on a college campus with that phrase as our backbone. I suppose you could say that every 18 seconds is our motto, and yet I hadn't stopped to contemplate why. It existed, I existed. All the things existed and that was that. All the existences.

Dear world, if your name was a verb, what would the action be?

They asked me that. We play this game called Hot Seat in the office to keep our minds moving and learning through the simplest, stupidest of means. It takes 1 minute of our lives. “To Myra,” they said, “is to over-analyze and think deeply.” But it seems there are times that I don't think enough, or perhaps I'm just thinking too much of the wrong things. Or perhaps our human minds can't bear the extremes. There are those ends of the spectrums we don't deal in every day, which is why they taught us to use scientific notation in math class so the impossibles made sense. 18 seconds aren't dealt with and neither are over 140 million. One's the footprint of an ant, the other are elephants measuring from your house to heaven. Too large. Too small. Too inconvenient.

Convenience sends one into some interesting situations. I've had oatmeal for dinner for a very long time, now, even though I have chicken in the freezer waiting to be cooked. Pretty sure I wore black on brown last week to avoid doing an extra load of laundry. My suitcase doesn't know what it means to be organized, and I'm afraid to show it or it'll start expecting that from me on a regular basis. And sometimes caring is inconvenient and I stop caring.

We all stop caring.

Because when did 18 seconds become something to care about?

That one time a gallon of milk was poured out. Then. That day, I started realizing how much more caring we could all be doing. How much more caring I needed to be doing because I have a lot of space in my heart, going up for sale and sitting inexcusably empty, in desperate need of souls while there are souls in the world in desperate need of hearts.

In 18 seconds I will be drinking the end of my Arnold Palmer and hitting save on this word document. 

Go sell your heart, and sell it for free, and let's make our hearts homes to things that matter. Let's make the houses of our hearts the homes for a world who needs to delve into extremes all over again.

Notice the blue tee shirt? The first run of the bus this season. Redbusproject.org

Red Bus Project

#onthemoveforphans