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.
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| @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.
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| Notice the blue tee shirt? The first run of the bus this season. Redbusproject.org |
Red Bus Project
#onthemoveforphans
