All things holy

See also: Shakespeare's Beam

I was in the car the other day watching buildings pass by, when it struck me, as it had many times before, that the act of creation is something holy. Something that partakes of the divine nature and mimics, in its own small way, the myriad acts of creation performed by God.

Immediately after this realization, however, there came to me the thought of my time working at McDonald's and Jack in the Box. Making many hundreds of cheap hamburger patties of the lowest quality that the customer would tolerate was surely not a sacred act.

When I see a contradiction like this there a few possibilities. The first is that I don't have enough information at hand and that there isn't a contradiction at all. In this conflict there didn't seem to be that situation. Besides that, though, it could be that the original premise was wrong. Or, finally, that the premise is so right that it forces me to reconsider other ideas that I held.

It was the third possibility that was proven in this situation, immediately after I relinquished my hold on the original premise. Creative acts were something holy, and making cheap hamburger patties was a creative act. And any paradox that I saw here, I realized, was purely my own invention.

Perhaps it seems frivolous. Perhaps it often is. But those hamburgers fed people. They relieved hunger. They sated appetites. For some who couldn't get anything more expensive, those hamburgers were as good as ambrosia.

It's such a little thing, but it still did something. Maybe it wasn't as much of a waste of my time as I first thought.