The Value of a Life

Sitting atop the food chain as humans, we don't see lives as things that begin and end. They have to high a price to be so simple. For myself and my compatriots as members of the Western World, that feeling is even more pronounced.

The other day I was at a meeting in a village way out in the middle of a forest here on the coast of Kenya. I sat in a plastic chair on a dirt patch and listened discuss forming a bee keeper's cooperative. The meeting, being all in Swahili, was a little hard for me to follow, so my gaze wandered to a millipede crawling around on the ground. Millipedes have incredible foot motion, where bunches of their legs move together in a way that creates a wave-like motion. Millions of years of evolution and natural selection made that possible. As the fascinating creature made its way towards the edge of the circle of chairs the meeting had formed, its life, probably incredibly important to itself, became inconsequential.

The man speaking shifted the position of his foot about two inches and when he lifted his foot again, there was the millipede, smashed into the red African dirt. Why was the millipede there? Who decided that it was his time to go? Was that the way it was supposed to happen? Those questions are answered in a million and one ways today as our beliefs evolve, but no matter your belief, the millipede was unlucky. Be it pure coincidence or bad karma, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. In a moment, his all important existence (with perspective) was ended.

Consciousness is a blessing and even more so a burden. As humans we can understand and value our lives beyond pure survival instinct. Each society and each human values life differently, death is death, but sometimes its DEATH. Needless to say, we aren't ants who blindly sacrifice ourselves for the sake of the colony, and we step on ants without considering how they might feel about the usefulness of their existence, but we seldom consider how privileged we are to be alive.