You are Ancient
How old are you? Would you consider yourself young or old? A aged crank or a sprightly whippersnapper? Whichever of the above you might identify with, in another sense, you are ancient. Indeed, every single person alive on the planet today is, in a sense, prehistoric.
Consider the question ‘where did we come from’?
We didn’t spontaneously arrive out of nowhere on the day of our birth. All that constitutes who we are did not arise in a vacuum. And, contrary to religious teachings, we were not created by a deity a few thousand years ago.
In reality, we are the result of a long chain of ancestors, all with experiences and qualities that have been passed on to us down a long line of succession.
We are part of a process of evolution that stretches back hundreds of millions of years. And, in turn, we are woven from the same material as those who came before.
Our inclinations, proclivities, likes, dislikes, worries and fears are, for the large part, not the result of our few short years we’ve spent walking the planet. They have been forged over millions of years through the struggles our predecessors undertook to survive.
Through our days living in trees in our apelike forms, to our years swimming through Cambrian waters. Within us all, is perhaps a billion years of accumulated wisdom on how to live.
When you smile at the kindness of your friends, that smile is the same worn by your neanderthal relatives; when you feel fear, that fear was felt in primitive degrees by our tetrapod forebears.
In short, our experience of life itself is not unique to us as individuals, or even as to us as humans. It is the cumulative experience of all that we have been through in our evolutionary history.
So what are the implications of being impossibly ancient? What can we make of this?
You are never alone
It might be worth considering that we are beings that exist in isolation. Rather, we are all connected to a long ancestral legacy. Your thoughts, feelings, and experiences are, most often, not weird or wrong. You are not unique when you feel lonely, awkward, or afraid. You are experiencing emotions that have been felt and refined by millions or years’ worth of beings.
And when you laugh and cry, your ancestors are laughing and crying with you.
Your feelings are wise
The thinking, calculating part of our brains is great at crunching numbers, analyzing, and rationalizing. But our intuition is another great source of insight.
This intuition, which lurks mysteriously under the surface of our consciousness, resulted from the collective experiences of our ancestors. Sometimes trusting it pays off. After all, this intuition kept us alive during the age of the dinosaurs.
You’re an evolutionary masterpiece
We often opine when considering our imperfections. But the reality is, we are all masterpieces; exquisitely well-adapted beings whose genetic material has survived and evolved from the earliest times.
Remember this whenever you feel inclined to curse your flaws and shortcomings.
You’ll live beyond your death. Mostly.
The notion of living beyond death takes on a new perspective when we consider that we are already ancient. Our genetic material, refined through ages, will be passed on to future generations. In a sense, wWe are the custodians of a biological heritage that transcends our individual lifetimes, contributing to the ongoing narrative of life on Earth.
And even if we don’t have children of our own, the essence of our experience as humans will nonetheless live on in future generations. While our consciousness may one day leave us, our human pattern will continue to propagate.
Living is magical
Finally, let us not forget that we are incredibly blessed as the recipients of these highly advanced human forms. The richness of our experiences has taken eons to arrive at its current state. And through our subjective reality we are able to experience life not just how it is to us, but how it was for those who came before.
