Reflection
Last night I attended a friend’s birthday gathering. He billed it as “a celebration of the anniversary of my exile from the womb”.
It was hot as hell, as summers here tend to be, but I was among friends and sharing good conversation.
But it reminded me of another night when I was hanging with him and a Jamaican friend of mine. they were chatting about scuba diving, as Andrew had just returned from Jamaica and he had sort of found a new religion in diving.
Jan shared that he loves the water. In fact, he said, “I’m more comfortable in water than I am on land”.
Anyway, i’m sure we were drunk or stoned or both, but he said something I thought interesting enough to share. He said, “I think the biggest evolutionary mistake we ever made was coming up out of the water, because we turned around and saw our reflections and suddenly had to cope with a sense of identity”.
Jan’s the type of guy who will drop some philosophical bomb like that into the conversation, and then go on about his business like nothing happened.
Anyway, ignoring the obvious fact that his theory’s not quite how it all went down, I deemed it a thought worth pondering, narcotics-induced or not.
Right now I’m working on a web project for a documentary dealing with teenage girls (no, not that kind of project), and so I’m reminded of that whole era of my life and how stressed I was about “finding myself”. Of course, once you get older, you realize what a pile of bullshit the stress was, but you never really stop searching for your identity.
If we had evolved in the water, with no reflections, how would it be different?
(I know, I know…we would have invented mirrors and the whole thing would have happened anyway.)
Oh, in case you’re wondering, though my friends were romanticizing water, I am most decidedly a landlubber; I can’t even swim.