For most of my life my primary concern has been myself. Sure I would care about other people, as much as my programming would allow. In the end though my universe was centered around me. That may sound selfish, but if I'm not around then everything else for me doesn't really matter. It may not have been the best way to run a ship, still it was my way and it was working for me. Mostly. There have been times where I'm watching a show or movie and I see people behaving how I wish I could be. It's an idealized version of friendship. Almost as though a Norman Rockwell painting has come to life. I know this and I still sometimes want it for myself and the people I call friends. That's not to say what I have is bad in any way. It's just more real. People can be thoughtless. I can be thoughtless. More often than not the thing I meant to say comes out as something else and people look at me like I'm trying to swallow a whole octopus. Even with all these blunders, I still knew what to expect.
Watching a lot of movies and television I felt like I had seen the story where a character is going to have a baby plenty of times. Sometimes they're sad, a lot of times they are happy, but almost always they are freaked the hell out. Just when you think you've got the game figured out, a new player comes onto the board. These characters would run around doing all sorts of wacky things or go through montages where they buy baby books, find a good doctor after sifting through all the crazy ones, and then going to various appointments. All this normally happens in the span of like twenty minutes because in the end the movie is still about the characters and not the tiny alien that's gestating inside one of them. The movie comes to an end with the birth of said alien and if you're lucky they may show a little bit of how wonderful it all is. Aw that's nice. I feel like I'm prepared.
We've been having babies since before we could call ourselves human. While I'm not sure I'd say we are exactly experts at the whole thing. I do feel like we've learned enough to be dangerous, but not quite deadly. Honestly it's a miracle that we're alive. Think about all the things that had to happen for you to be here right now? If the exact scenario of your conception didn't happen it's likely you wouldn't be around to read this. Millions of things have to go right for each person to be born. Change the timing and a boy may be a girl. Change the environment and maybe the whole thing falls apart halfway through. Our bodies are these complex mechanisms that we really have very little control over. Sure we can shovel fuel in the form of our favorite flavors into it in order to keep things running, but we can't exactly tell our kidneys to step up their game. Most of the time I can't get my stomach on board with the same food I've eaten a hundred times before Sometimes I wish there was some kind of external monitoring system that told me what the hell was going on inside of me. I suppose it wouldn't matter because without control that information is useless. I could tell you my heart rate right now, but that doesn't really give me the whole picture of all the other things connected to that piece of information. Now think about how inside someone they're building a completely new person from scratch. Sure I helped in my small way, but it was really a fire and forget. Somehow it's putting together its own brain. If it's doing that then it means we did that ourselves at some point. We really created ourselves.
Knowing this it kind of makes me sad to think how easily we forget about the miracle that is our own lives. Sure reality means there's more to it than simply marveling at how amazing our bodies are. As adults we're kind of over the whole magic of life and the world around us. Now go watch a little kid in the same environment and notice how ensorcelled they are by the smallest things. I can't quite remember when the world stopped being so overwhelmingly magical to me. I think with the internet and the world being full of people who are genuinely trying to hold onto or at least recapture that sense of wonder, it's not a lost cause. Children are the constant reminder that the world can be a wondrous place. While they're running around being amazed at everything in the world, the adults are running right behind them being terrified of that same world consuming the tiny versions of ourselves. This means my primary concern is no longer myself. Instead it's going to be this external portion of myself that is scampering off to go eat dirt and actively put itself into dangerous situations because it has no idea that a mountain lion wielding a chainsaw isn't something you run towards.
