A Wildly Audacious and Miraculous Evolutionary Accessory (February 2021)

I question a lot of things about this life, including why, some days, I have to live it. However, if I had to pick one thing about sentience that I actually enjoy, it’s the ability to transform and be transformed. The deep irony of asking myself, “This again?” every morning upon waking is that it implies monotony, repetition, and routine. Whereas the true implication of “this again” is having to rise and commit to twenty-fours hours of complete chaos: never knowing what adaptations and pivots and allowances we will have to make to stay mentally and physically alive at any given hour. And we have to get up and do this, every single day, until we are dead. In that sense, being unconscious in bed really does feel a lot easier.

What keeps me getting out of bed then is the lure of being transformed — easily, painfully, hilariously, tearfully, angrily, joyfully. While sometimes we are transformed by accident, or without our permission, other times we are transformed slowly, through intention and deliberate commitment. I think the best friendships are like that: the lure that pulls us out of bed, day after day, with the promise that we will get back in a little better off than when we got out through a mutual agreement to transform through chaos. It’s no small stuff.

The other night I stood out on the reservoir and saw the moon mist over. I thought about how some people are falling asleep, and on the other side of the world some people are waking up, and how it is just a fact that some people won’t wake today at all. In this way, we are all living an immutable pact: that we will sleep and rise, sleep and rise, until we don’t. To make any lasting pact beyond this one, to other humans no less, is a wildly audacious and miraculous evolutionary accessory: a deep belief in the capacity of life to be greater than mere survival. The belief that we can adorn the passage of time with people that make our waking hours not only tolerable, but fulfilling. The belief that there are people to even be found at all.

Maybe the moon isn’t in your sky. Maybe our clocks don’t match the time. Maybe I cannot see you. And yet we still choose to rise, day after day, in this mutual agreement all the same.