Excerpt from an essay by Claire Shultz, titled: Why, in a universe of pain, I’m saving stranded earthworms

I find that, sometimes, thinking about earthworms so much leaves me questioning how I’m using my time. Perhaps I could be doing something better, something more. The choices multiply in front of me, magnified on tip screens and advertisements and cardboard signs. Paper or plastic? Cage-free or free range? Regular or organic? Bottled or tap? Gas or electric? Would you like to round up to donate? Do you want to make a difference? Your monthly gift is urgently needed. And amid the spectacle of choices, I imagine all the wriggling worms – all those I will ever save, and the many more I can’t – accumulating before my eyes to form some vast, incoherent sum. Will I ever save enough? Will I ever know if I’ve done enough to make a difference? And what if I had used all the time I’ve spent saving worms to do something better, kinder, more sacrificial, more helpful? How many worm-lives add up to equal the life of a dog, a whale, a human, a tree?

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I believe there is space for joy, even amid all this uncertainty and suffering, amid this bad hand we’ve been dealt. The longer we spend despairing about the state of the world and our own inaction, the less time we have to make any kind of difference, to find the elements of life that make it worth living. Even as the world fractures before our eyes, we are here, participating in life. Like the earthworm, like everything, for better or for worse, we are. We cannot spend our lives in indecision, waiting for the perfect intervention. The world changes around us as we idle, as we chase that elusive space between too much and not enough. All the while, cities swarm and swell around us. Rivers flow. Trees fall. Oceans rise. People are born and leave a mark and die. All we have to do is decide what difference we will make, what we will save. Even if it’s just a worm, writhing on a sidewalk in the Ohio sun.