While the electric kettle boiled, I stood in my kitchen and gazed out of the window. I was wondering about evolution. How did we become self-aware? At what point in time did it happen? I poured the hot water into my favorite Japanese mug, watching the black tea leaves as they bloomed within a satchel. Why did I wonder about these things so early in the morning?
I drank my tea, and a scene played out in my mind:
Billions of years into the past, two microbes were swimming in a prehistoric pond of goo. One microbe had become self-aware and was seeking help from another microbe, who was a trained therapist.
The first microbe said, hey doctor I was curious about my environment so I decided to start perceiving.
Oh, said the therapist. Big mistake.
Yeah, said the microbe. I woke up and I started asking all these questions like, who am I? Why am I aware? Is there a purpose to my awareness?
How did that make you feel? Said the therapist.
Confused, said the microbe. Yeah, have you noticed how since becoming aware, you can sense all the pain, and feel all the pain, and so you wish for the pain to stop, but then because it never changes you suffer and feel dead?
I know exactly what you mean, the therapist said, and then diagnosed the microbe with depression.
I started giggling while I wrote this weird scene down, and with my other hand I was scratching my poodle who needed comfort. He is a self-aware creature and, as such, has intense anxiety.
In the afternoon, my questions about self-awareness lingered in my brain. I decided I would do what I normally do to satiate my curiosity, which is eat and read something.
I boiled water in a pot and steamed a chicken bao in a bamboo basket. My right leg was burning and becoming numb due to my old-injured nerves, and my phobia of paralysis began to sneak up on me, threatening a panic attack, so I started dancing and singing the song: everything is awesome, everything is cool when you're part of a team, everything is awesome, when you're living out a dream.
My lunch was devoured while reading a book of letters by Franz Kafka. I felt stunned as I realized I was time traveling, reading a letter Kafka wrote when he was twenty years old:
"Have you noticed how late-summer shadows dance on dark turned-up earth, how they dance physically? Have you noticed how the earth rises toward the grazing cow, how trustfully it rises? Have you noticed how rich, heavy soil crumbles under too delicate fingers, how solemnly it crumbles?” — Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family and Editors; from a letter to his classmate named Oskar, 1902
After reading I thought, how incredible that I’ve just visited a countryside and witnessed a young man with a handful of dirt, and saw him full of wonder on being alive and self-aware, and mourning the beauty of it. And then I thought about myself, standing in my kitchen over a century later, playing the same game of, “Have you noticed how…?” So, I began to tear up while rereading the last line, picturing the crumbling soil, how we all wonder about the universe, hoping to sense and perceive the world as it goes to pieces around us and transforms again.
Have you noticed how self-aware we are? Isn’t it strange to hold soil in your hand and feel a kinship with the way it softly falls apart? Are you unsettled that you can identify your own grief with its crumbling?
In the movie “How to talk to girls at parties” based on Neil Gaiman’s story (I love the Moon and Ba illustrated novel) one of the characters says something in the lines of “What if we are just the defense mechanism of a cell?” And that phrase sparks something when some people hear it.
Coincidentally, in the illustrated novel my favorite phrase is “You cannot hear a poem without it changing you”
And your letter made think about this so thank you!
This is so beautiful!!!! Thank you!