day no. 16,264: every fallen man and acorn

“There are two equal and eternal ways of looking at this twilight world of ours: we may see it as the twilight of evening or the twilight of morning; we may think of anything, down to a fallen acorn, as a descendant or as an ancestor.” — G.K. Chesterton, A Defense of Nonsense

Every fallen man, like every fallen acorn, is both a descendant and an ancestor. He is a seed descended from fruit and he will be buried as seed when it's all said and done. 

We honor our fathers and mothers by respecting what has been handed down to us as well as the hands that worked hard to hand it off and by becoming the kind of people who work hard to to improve and build upon that which we inherited in order to have something even better of our own to hand down.

As is often the case, by meeting the one, we fulfill the other. The very act of honoring your ancestors is handing down a respect for ancestry to your descendants. Being an honorable descendant is the first act of becoming an honorable ancestor. Everyone must have the humility to realize that they did not arrive here by their own efforts and everyone must have the responsibility to realize that their descendants will inherit the world they leave to them.

The twilight reminds us of the warmth of the day already enjoyed and the hope of the warmth it will send tomorrow. Every acorn is an end and a beginning. Every son of Adam and daughter of Eve is a offspring and a parent. We all have harbors in which we safely docked and from which many will boldly launch.

And I would be remiss if I did not punctuate this principle here by revisiting Macaulay,

“People who take no pride in the noble achievements of remote ancestors will never achieve anything worthy to be remembered with pride by remote descendants.”