From Overhead

Lately, I've spent a great deal of time thinking about rocks. In human terms, rocks aren't animate objects. They aren't alive. They don't breath nor think. They possess neither consciousness nor a soul. They just are.

But really, how do we know that any of this conjecture is really true? Who is to say that, just because we don't "see" the life of rocks, such lives don't exist?

Our problem is that rocks don't seem to change during our short-term lives. I have a pail of rocks that I collected from the shores of Lake Michigan as a young child (approximately 47 years ago). From time to time, I get the rocks out of my closet to look at and feel them. Over the years, the rocks haven't appeared to change. The colors and lines look about the same and the tactile smoothness feels the same.

I bet that, if I continue to get "my rocks" out every few years and I live to be 110, I still won't notice any changes. So, in my pea brain, rocks appear to be a mass without life.

But what if I lived for 1,000, 10,000 or 1 million years? Would my understanding of rocks be different? Would I be able to watch their birth, life and death? Would I come to view rocks the same as butterflies, worms, doves and people?

For me, the time sequence is what affects my perceptions of the life around me. Things that seem to change in the blink of an eye are deemed alive; things that don't are deemed to be not alive.

That's only sort of true, though. It's been a week since I had my gallbladder removed. Each night as I go to bed, I've looked at the stitching on my belly. I have three areas that were opened up by the surgeon that are now held together by thread.

If I stare at each site intently, I don't see any active healing. Yet, each night when I look, each wound looks a slight bit healthier. So, despite the fact I can't see the actual workings of my body healing these wounds, I can see the affects of this activity afterwords.

So, what's alive and what isn't? If I am sentient, why can't a rock be too?