shanemagee.com inspiration circulation

I came across a very interesting world clock counter on poodwaddle.com, (thanks to Joy Bringer at zaadz for finding it) showing world population increases, births, deaths and a whole bunch of other stuff. You can show increases on a yearly, weekly and daily basis - mot to mention the ‘now’ button, upon pressing which all the counters start off from zero. Within the first twenty seconds, there are 90 births and 41 deaths - including a couple of cases of heart disease, a traffic accident and a suicide - 27 marriages and 6 divorces. 8 hectares of forest have been cut down, 33 cars manufactured, 73 bicycles, and 58 computers.

It would be nice to see some of the more depressing stats here balanced out with statistics like number of smiles given, number of kindnesses performed (and so forth), but I suppose goodness has always been much less amenable to measurement than its counterpart. Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s old maxim comes to mind: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye….”

The most striking thing, for me at any rate, was going to the ‘daily’ button and looking at the number of deaths. It is only 1 pm here, and already 82,000 people have shuffled off the mortal coil today, replaced by almost 200,000 new souls eagerly embarking on their new world-adventure. In this age of standing out from the crowd, there is something very levelling about one being placed in the daily ‘outbox’ of the world along with over eighty thousand people you never met. For a few minutes, I looked in mute wonder at the game of birth and death being played out before my eyes; somewhere in these figures an invisible hand beckoned me, and fed my inner yearning to dig beyond the figures and find the meaning behind it all.