Stronger than Fear

 

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Introduction

Three lines, set at angles, conjoined at the edges. It seemed simple. It looked simple. Childish, almost, a game of matching shapes. And yet, it didn’t feel simple.

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Chapter 1

A triangle.

That’s all it was. But it was everywhere. She rifled through the sheets distractedly – on this one, on that one, fronts, backs, edges, margins. Not just on her students’ papers, but on all those turned in to her fellow teachers as well. And not just at their school. Not just in Springfield. Not even just in the state.

She’d already been online, where chat forums and social media were overflowing with posts from teachers and parents and caregivers worldwide, all with the same story. Since Thursday afternoon at 3:33PM, in whatever time zone each happened to be, all the world’s children had begun to draw triangles incessantly, on paper, on sidewalks, on track fields and beaches.

It was now Friday, 2:59PM local, and it hadn’t stopped. The bizarre behavior had been going on all night. The children seemed almost possessed, unable to stop, fingers that should have been cramped and bleeding and yet they only continued to draw, slowly, patiently, calmly, somehow fed from within. In every color, in every size, on every surface. Triangle after triangle after triangle.

Rumors and theories abounded. News programs brought in experts. CNN was running the story nonstop, with live feeds from multiple locations. Physicists, psychiatrists, mathematicians, kindergarten teachers – none could say why this was happening. Why the urgency. Why the significance – that shape in particular.

They’d tried stopping the drawing. But each child would only pause long enough to look up with a beatific smile and a brilliant blue light shining through his or her eyes, and speak one word: Love. Then back to the paper, the pencil, the lines, those never-ending lines.

The shape didn’t feel threatening. It didn’t feel harmful. And neither did the look on their faces. No harm could come to you there. And yet, the power behind that look, that shape, the impulse that was obviously throbbing and pulsing through the blood and the minds and the collective thought form driving this behavior – there was no mistaking the supremacy in that flow. No mistaking that this was not a question. Not an option. In some form or another, it had become the prime directive. It was time. No one was asking for permission anymore. No one expected it to be given in a world that had been overtaken by fear.

The truth was staring them in the face: Love truly was stronger than fear. We had been right all along.

What was next? From where was this wave springing, the one guiding the hands and hearts and minds of so many? That held absolute power? That had stopped the world in its tracks?

No one knew. But it was clear the answer was just around the corner. No one knew why, but all were waiting as the seconds ticked slowly passed, waiting for 3:33. 

 

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