Two-Minute Entreaty by Anthony Doerr

So I'm in Chipotle again, and I wonder why I waited so long.

It wasn't the food poisoning scare, unless that negativity in the air somehow helped me remember not to spend so much money eating out.  Eating at Chipotle feels like an investment though.  Some of those other places keep me feeling like I'm throwing money away.

Notes on punctuation, hyphens, paragraphs and style.  I put two spaces after each sentence.  The text on the cup puts one.  I agreed with all the capitalizations that I noticed until "I say, Be big."  Why would we capitalize the Be?  Hyphens continue to be used indiscriminately in my opinion, but I was thrilled not to catch any misspellings.  There was one comma that I thought should have been a semi-colon.  I'm not checking my own typing below one more time in homage to my OCD.


On the side of the cup there is this:


Two-Minute Entreaty by Anthony Doerr  (I wonder if he's a doer??)

Tattoo Earth's 4.5-billion-year timeline onto your arm, shoulder to fingertip, and your upper arm will get nothing but geologic mayhem: meteorites, magma, acid rain.  Life won't begin until your bicep, and from there to your wrist it's all single-celled, oceangoing stuff.  Reproductive sex won't show up until your wristwatch, and creatures that are finally big enough to see- tubes and fronds and weird Precambrian plant-animals- will crisscross the back of your hand.

Trilobites paddle across your palm; ancient forests grow from your knuckles; dinosaurs wind around the joints at the ends of your fingers.  Mammals burrow into your cuticles.

Orangutans, arrowheads, Cleopatra, the names of the stars- they all have to fit on the sliver of fingernail at the end of your longest finger.

And you?  Your grandma's toffee bars, your CD collection, your treehouse, your best-ever Halloween costume, every regret you'll ever have, every dream you'll ever dream, every mouth you'll ever kiss (or wish you had)- they'll all ride the microscopic edge of your fingernail, a tattoo so thin you'd need an electron microscope to glimpse it.

File your nail and you'll wipe out your entire family tree, and Shakespeare and ancient Greece with it.

We are each no more than a spark, a mote illuminated for a split-second as it passes through a beam of light.

Pascal said, "When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after...  I am frightened."

People say, "Who wants to feel so small?  Let me eat my burrito."

I say, Be big.  Big-hearted, big-witted, big-eyed.  See, try, love, read, make, paint, and taste everything you can while you can.

You still have some hours left.  Go.