The wizard had found no love, and found his attention quickly turned to other matters. He'd developed a peculiar knack for turning his attention away from love. Part of this was deliberate; the attraction of his dark, mysterious, lovely female counterpart was a problem that his spells could not solve directly. He could not seek her out, as he'd known for some time. He could only create himself anew and allow her to find him, allow her to identify herself to him. He had no idea how she would do this, so he simply waited. In the meantime, he found himself waiting for many other things. And he saw that time was running out.
He contemplated his magical hourglass one afternoon, watching the sand run toward the center. He'd just realized, in that moment, that it was indeed a magical hourglass. He realized that every hourglass was magical, every grain of sand was magical, and that everything in the universe around him was indeed made of magic. He began to wonder if anything was possible at all without exercising magic. It was during this insight that the sand in the glass began to teach him the true nature of time. Time didn't run out; it ran down. It converged and collapsed on itself, approaching one moment where a new Eternity would open. The sand was rapidly converging on this point.
The old sand had been forged by this curious time-transmutation process. It had been formed into glass, and shaped into a gateway through which the New Time now flowed. Eternity had been created, collapsed, experienced, and repeated many times over. He was the sand. He was the One Grain, and he was the Beach. It had happened many times, but only once. It was all happening Now. The great expansion, the great collapse, the great love, the great sorrows, the tragedy and the mounting ecstasy were pretending to converge on one moment. In reality, they were all One and had always been.
The wizard saw his basic problems in the Teachings of the Sand. He saw that he had been asking himself how he would make time for all of the experiences that he wanted to have. He wanted to make love to the woman who would allow him to experience himself, and he saw the folly in this. She had never left his side. She had remained with him so faithfully since the dawn of time, that she had disappeared from his sight. Or seemed to. He could not create time for her unless he took himself deeply into the world of loneliness. This wasn't where he wanted to go.
He needed, he saw, a way to give time away to others. He needed to give the experiences away. He needed to share all time through all eternity with all people. He knew that he wanted to have it all, and he knew that he could only have it all if everyone had it all.
The wizard opened his eyes and saw the day in a new light. It was time to make time disappear. When he finally pulled off this trick, he was amazed at how simple it had been all along.
