Strawberries and Sand: The Philosophy

I love strawberries, but if you buy the real kind, the ones from the country road-side stand that were picked earlier that morning and carried across the turn-row instead of the ones picked two days prior and trucked endless miles, you will almost always find that they are mingled with a little bit of sand. This makes them more authentic, not less appealing. The supermarket strawberries look better than their country counterparts, to be sure, but this is an illusion. Inside they are but bland and vapid, anticlimax cloaked in crimson. When you bite into an authentic country strawberry, though you must take care for the sand, the taste never disappoints. Real life is like the country strawberry. And life is about finding the strawberries amidst the sand.

Some time ago I came across a passage in "Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl" that has stuck with me ever since. Just three weeks before the raid on The Annex, the diary tells of how those who were helping hide the Frank family managed to procure a large amount of strawberries:

“We ate hot cereal with strawberries…bread with strawberries, strawberries for dessert, strawberries with sugar, strawberries with sand. For two days there was nothing but strawberries, strawberries, strawberries, and then our supply was either exhausted or in jars, safely under lock and key”(328).

I can’t begin to imagine after subsisting on a diet of potatoes, beans, and rice, with only the occasional dessert or piece of candy, how wonderful strawberries must have been. Even in the darkest of moments, it is the simple pleasures that take the sting out of human suffering. But my cynical side still wonders what the point was in making so much jam, of preserving so many strawberries for another day. They would not remain long enough to enjoy them. It is this balancing act of life that is most difficult to all of us—what to enjoy today, and what to save till tomorrow. I can’t help but wonder what happened to those preserved strawberries.

And so there are these two things we must do in life to stay sane, I think. We must find the strawberries amidst the sand, and we must find a way of both enjoying those strawberries today and preserving those strawberries for tomorrow. Writing is one of the few ways to do that, and this blog will be an exercise in that discipline.