We live on a small, fragile planet, spinning silently through space, bound by gravity to a single star, the Sun, which lies about ninety-three million miles from the Earth.
That star itself is one among hundreds of billions in a single galaxy and our galaxy is one among trillions scattered across an unfathomably vast universe.
Astronomers now estimate that there are more planets in existence than there are grains of sand on all the beaches of the world. In that context, the Earth is not merely small; it is insignificant. And yet on this minute speck of rock suspended in an immense dark ocean, we have constructed lines of division that we treat as sacred.
From a cosmic perspective, the Earth is not divided into nations, territories or spheres of influence. There are no lines etched into the surface of the land declaring that one piece of ground belongs to one people and the next to another.
The planet is continuous. The soil does not change colour at a frontier, the air does not pause to check a passport and the sea does not recognise where one country ends and another begins.
Yet we have built our entire political and emotional lives around these invisible lines, defending them as though they were natural features of the world rather than inventions of human history.
We behave as though the Earth itself recognises our claims, when in reality the planet remains indifferent to them. The borders that now shape our world are not ancient or inevitable.
Many of them are the result of conquest, empire, war and negotiation conducted by powerful actors with little regard for those who lived on the land being divided.
In parts of Africa, colonial administrators and surveyors carved up vast territories into 'countries' on maps drawn in distant European capitals, often slicing directly through existing communities, languages, cultures and trading routes.
Peoples who had lived alongside one another for generations were abruptly told that they were now citizens of different states, governed by different authorities and subject to different laws.
What had once been shared land became contested territory. Lines on a map hardened into frontiers and frontiers into flashpoints for conflict. The consequences of those arbitrary divisions are still being lived out today, in political instability, civil wars and enduring tensions that have little to do with ancient hatreds and much to do with modern administrative fiction. This tendency to draw lines and defend them is not limited to geopolitics. It reflects something deep within human psychology.
We are territorial creatures. We guard our homes, our gardens, our parking spaces and our sense of belonging with surprising ferocity. We take personal offence at small incursions into what we perceive as 'ours', even when the boundaries themselves are ordinary and petty. The same instinct scales up to the level of nations. The defence of borders becomes emotionally charged, moralised, and infused with language about honour, sovereignty, security and identity.
To cross a line on a map is treated not merely as a legal matter, but as an affront to a people’s sense of who they are. We project personal possessiveness onto entire landscapes and then elevate that possessiveness into national virtue. Yet when one steps back, the logic begins to look faintly absurd.
The Earth is a closed ecological system. We breathe the same air, drink water that has circulated through countless countries and landscapes and depend on the same thin atmosphere and fragile climate for our survival. Pollution does not stop at customs posts.
Viruses do not respect visa regimes. Climate change does not pause at border crossings. The problems that now most threaten human well-being are planetary in scale, while the politics used to attempt to address them remain stubbornly narrow-minded.
We organise ourselves as though the world were a patchwork of self-contained gardens, each to be defended against encroachment, even as the very conditions of life on those gardens are shaped by forces that ignore their fences.
There is something both ridiculous and tragic in this mismatch between the physical reality of the world and the symbolic reality we have constructed. The borders that divide us are real in their effects. They determine who may move, who may work, who may seek refuge and who may live or die in a war.
But they are not real in the way mountains, rivers and oceans are real. They exist because we collectively agree to behave as though they do. That agreement has produced systems of order and governance, but it has also produced walls, exclusions, resentments and an endless cycle of disputes over pieces of ground that, in any deeper sense, belong to none of us. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing is not that borders exist but that we have come to treat them as sacred.
We are prepared to kill and die for lines that were once drawn by officials in distant rooms, often in haste, ignorance, or indifference. On a small planet in a vast universe of countless worlds, this seems a peculiarly short-sighted way to organise our loyalties.
The ground beneath our feet is continuous. The air in our lungs is shared. The world does not recognise our divisions even if we do.
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