The Grasshopper or the Locust

11, 7, 43, 97, 51, 72

Stop for a moment and think about these numbers. Wherever you are in life, one of these numbers could have been and could still be your last number here on Earth.

Your last day, your last hug, kiss, smile, embrace, laugh, joke, heartbreak.

Your last word. Your last breath. Your last thought.

Numbers are sequential because we love to add, to grow, to build. We want to get bigger, better, as if we have something grand to aim for. Whatever you desire, for whatever reason, be it a number, a person, a lifestyle, a body, a skill, a career, remember, you once desired the place you are in. More likely than not, the things in your life are things you once only dreamt of having. Maybe its a connection with your spouse, maybe its the health of your family, maybe its a promotion. Wherever you are, you once hoped for nothing more to be right here, right now.

You see, you don't need much to live a good life. In a heartening sense. This is in relation to how seriously you regard this game of life. A single thought can rupture the seems and unravel the thread, unwinding your world along with it. You must be careful where you put your energy to ensure you do not end up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Envy, jealousy, greed, impatience, these are all available at a moments notice. Love, honesty, compassion, gratitude, these are all available at a moments notice.

Have you ever stopped to wonder the difference between a grasshopper and a locust? For a grasshopper to metamorph into the locust, very certain conditions must be present. For this genetic marvel to take place, the grasshopper needs a small percentage increase in its serotonin levels over the duration of a few hours. Yes, if you are thinking that serotonin is the stress molecule you would be right in thinking so. This fascinating natural process holds within it a key to understanding good and evil and the power of choice.

Why? I hear you cry. Why oh why?

Well, simply put, grasshoppers are dope and locusts are land ravaging plague-like insects that wreck havoc on crops and farmland by the acre. Something grasshoppers are not prone to do. A locust swarm can be up to 460 miles in size and carry with it somewhere in the range of 60-80 million locusts. Each one of those locusts can eat its weight in plants each day, which if you think is not a lot because of the size of a locust, this number adds up to nearly 423 million pounds of plants, each day. Are you getting that? Entire swaths of land go devastated all because of an increase in stress in the grasshoppers. If you can't imagine the size of this spectacle, please take a second to search a video up on Youtube, I guarantee you will not be disappointed.

We can use this imagery in our daily lives to better understand the power we wield in our choices and how depending on which choice we make we stoke the fire of the grasshopper or the locust. You have, in every moment, in every decision, the ability to create momentum that pushes you on a certain path in life.

The real question is, will you maintain stable, honest, good choices, or will you feed the demons lurking in your shadows, the ones based in fear and avoidance and suffering? Will you remain the grasshopper, or shift and change and morph into that of the locust? Will you choose light or dark, good or evil?

The choice is yours. What happens next, is up to fate.