Each has a different journey

BBC Professor Brian Cox’s Forces of Nature last night was another stunner! Explaining how earth’s beauty is created by just a handful of forces, he gave a detailed account of the formation and startlingly beautiful symmetry of all snowflakes. Whilst sharing the same basic shape and form, each is marvellously and particularly different. No two snowflakes are identical. Why? – because of the journey each has taken to its resting place on earth. Movement, the pull of gravity, patterns of humidity – the way is unique for every one. Snowflakes, that is. But also human persons. No two are identical. Because we all experience a different journey; myriad experiences along the way. It’s the roads travelled, as well as the basic physics, that makes us alive – who and what we are. Forces of nature creating forces of nature. Yes: I am continually awestruck – and because I am a human person, capable of thought and of reflection, I shall take the more care to respect the long life highroads that others are treading – some of them quite, quite beyond my experience or aspiration.