In a world where we can chat with the Ancestors
Good evening, Goodreaders.
Having at last mailed 10 free copies of KAIROS to 10 individuals located in 10 of these United States, I can turn my attention to the riveting topic of the night: life lessons we might gain from chatting with the Ancestors.
Naturally, I've no idea from where your immediate ancestors derive, though I do know that if we go back far enough it doesn't matter; we all came out of Africa and before that, we were rodent-like subterranean creatures living literally under the feet of dinosaurs and before that, well, we were slimy little things dragging ourselves from the primordial soup for a breath of a recently new-fangled environmental development called oxygen. All the successful primordial-soup folk were trying it.
Quite frankly, chatting with the primordial folk would be nothing short of dull by our standards, as beyond the obvious observations about the lack of cars or fingernail clippers or shared language, anything crawling fresh from primordial soup has, at minimum, only the vaguest sense of anyone or anything beyond itself and ... oh. Wait. Perhaps we've not crawled that far after all.
Turning our attention to the furry varmints who, by sheer will of survival, learned to live subterranean in order to avoid the 30 ton teeth roaming above ground. Chatting with our ancestral varmints might prove far more insightful than our distant, primordial slime relatives. I mean, picture the adorable Pika--only armed with seriously long incisors--dashing about, here, there, here, there, moving stuff from one place to another and back again. Surely a prehistoric Pika would have things ... wait Whoa. I see the similarities in this one, too.
BUT, say we go back only as far as Africa, which we've all heard of and maybe even visited and can therefore relate to on some level. There the Ancestors lived in trees to avoid large predators until they figured out, through trial-and-error team-building exercises, how to get along and basically work as a group. They then fashioned tools and instantly began crossing each other's boundaries because the stuff on the other side seemed oh-so-much-better than the stuff on their side seemed to be and .... Dang.
Let's stick with the recent Ancestors. Mine are basically Brits who emigrated from the wild, warring blurry line between England and Scotland only to find themselves plunked down in the equally hazy line of Kentucky. There, after mingling with the Natives, they again gathered up their meager belongings and wandered, ON FOOT, mind you, across the yet undivided continental U.S. to land in SLC where they were instantly branded among the poor and nameless by one Brigham Young, and, as a result, were immediately dispatched to 'build up' godless places like northern Wyoming and central Idaho. If there's one thing Brigham hated, it was the poor.
This assessment has left me eerily unclear as to whether a chat with the Ancestors would prove me or anyone else to be better off than whatever crawled out of the soup, but what IS clear is that no matter how much the soup has complicated in the last billion years, whatever drove us from the soup in the first place remains basically unchanged.
There is HOPE, however, because if you watch Queer Eye (and it would be odd not to), you know that to change your perspective is to change EVERYTHING and that, my good-reading-friends, is the beautiful truth of any being in any age.
What were your Ancestors like?
Having at last mailed 10 free copies of KAIROS to 10 individuals located in 10 of these United States, I can turn my attention to the riveting topic of the night: life lessons we might gain from chatting with the Ancestors.
Naturally, I've no idea from where your immediate ancestors derive, though I do know that if we go back far enough it doesn't matter; we all came out of Africa and before that, we were rodent-like subterranean creatures living literally under the feet of dinosaurs and before that, well, we were slimy little things dragging ourselves from the primordial soup for a breath of a recently new-fangled environmental development called oxygen. All the successful primordial-soup folk were trying it.
Quite frankly, chatting with the primordial folk would be nothing short of dull by our standards, as beyond the obvious observations about the lack of cars or fingernail clippers or shared language, anything crawling fresh from primordial soup has, at minimum, only the vaguest sense of anyone or anything beyond itself and ... oh. Wait. Perhaps we've not crawled that far after all.
Turning our attention to the furry varmints who, by sheer will of survival, learned to live subterranean in order to avoid the 30 ton teeth roaming above ground. Chatting with our ancestral varmints might prove far more insightful than our distant, primordial slime relatives. I mean, picture the adorable Pika--only armed with seriously long incisors--dashing about, here, there, here, there, moving stuff from one place to another and back again. Surely a prehistoric Pika would have things ... wait Whoa. I see the similarities in this one, too.
BUT, say we go back only as far as Africa, which we've all heard of and maybe even visited and can therefore relate to on some level. There the Ancestors lived in trees to avoid large predators until they figured out, through trial-and-error team-building exercises, how to get along and basically work as a group. They then fashioned tools and instantly began crossing each other's boundaries because the stuff on the other side seemed oh-so-much-better than the stuff on their side seemed to be and .... Dang.
Let's stick with the recent Ancestors. Mine are basically Brits who emigrated from the wild, warring blurry line between England and Scotland only to find themselves plunked down in the equally hazy line of Kentucky. There, after mingling with the Natives, they again gathered up their meager belongings and wandered, ON FOOT, mind you, across the yet undivided continental U.S. to land in SLC where they were instantly branded among the poor and nameless by one Brigham Young, and, as a result, were immediately dispatched to 'build up' godless places like northern Wyoming and central Idaho. If there's one thing Brigham hated, it was the poor.
This assessment has left me eerily unclear as to whether a chat with the Ancestors would prove me or anyone else to be better off than whatever crawled out of the soup, but what IS clear is that no matter how much the soup has complicated in the last billion years, whatever drove us from the soup in the first place remains basically unchanged.
There is HOPE, however, because if you watch Queer Eye (and it would be odd not to), you know that to change your perspective is to change EVERYTHING and that, my good-reading-friends, is the beautiful truth of any being in any age.
What were your Ancestors like?
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