From & To Sathish #7 - Page 115

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20260603-10-stunning-summer-homes-in-harmony-with-nature

10 stunning summer homes that are in harmony with nature

"people who die of thirst in the desert are sometimes found carrying full bottles of water, because they were afraid that if they drank it, they would have nothing left for later."

Isn’t that profound and speaks volumes about how so many of us live?

We save love for the right person, money for the right crisis, words for the right moment, dreams for the right age, joy like emergency ration, afraid that if we spend it today, life may refuse us tomorrow.

But what is the point of carrying water if you die thirsty?

That bottle is a metaphor for everything we keep postponing: The trip, call, apology, confession, book, risk, small happiness, ordinary Tuesday we could have made beautiful.

Seneca wrote, “While we wait for life, life passes.”

Maybe wisdom is knowing when to conserve and when to drink. Because fear can make even abundance useless.

And sometimes, survival begins the moment you stop saving life for later and finally take a sip.

I sometimes look upon life, and wonder how in that vast maze, we somehow manage to find, those that we care about, and call friends and family. I often look back through the maze, and into the past, and fondly and with gratitude, reminisce about those who touched my lives, and went away. Some into the next dimension.

Life, our lives, and all of us, are dots moving around in an already complicated maze, and sometimes fate and chance connects us. For good and for bad. But, I bet, there is something, looking down on the board of life, and with a flick of its fingers, tentacles, or maybe with just a thought, changing the course of the dots that are lives, and moving them around to meet in love or worse, in conflict.

In case you were not aware of it, the chess game, has a total number of possible game variations, that is estimated to be roughly 10 to the power of 120.

Known as the Shannon Number, this is greater than the estimated number of atoms in the entire observable universe.

If the 16 white and 16 black characters on a chess board can throw up such a mind-boggling number such as the Shannon Number, then just stop and think of the billions of humans on this planet, and how we go about their daily lives, meeting other people, and what each contact is doing to the other. Just a thought.