I just watched the world population clock tick past 8,000,000,000 on the worldometer.

Of course the number is just an estimate and almost meaningless as a ticking counter – we might actually have crossed that threshold months ago, or perhaps we still haven’t – but there it went, momentous somehow, nothing somehow.

Eight billion of us here on this earth. The few humans we might meet in our lifetimes are less than a rounding error against the total eclipse of that figure.

I heard someone say that there will never be more children alive on earth than there are today. That fact, be it a true fact or not, made me wonder how many children are born each day.

385,000 children born today. Today.

Just imagine all the experiences that this lot will have. How many of the people born today will I meet? Perhaps none. Yet each of them will inhabit this earth, they along with the next 385,000 to be born tomorrow. Their lives will share all the same essential components as mine.

We will experience joys, and pains, feel love, taste hate; think and see and touch; wonder at the world as we wander out in the world. We share all that and more, yet I will never know you outside of the arbitrary provocation of this made up clock that has counted you into the world.