whitebread

induced by bill bryson’s “a short history of nearly everything”:
we, as humans are the only animals on the planet who know they are animals. we have more capability to change the planet than any other animal that has ever lived, and for some reason we insist on killing one another in large numbers, and forcing others to suffer. as if peaceful life were not itself hard enough. perhaps the great tragedy (and, i think, simultaneously the great hope) in all this is that we are all related. closely. the differerence between you and any other person is expressed in hundreths of percents. we are all, quite literally, family. the next time you’re on a somewhat crowded street corner, view all the people around you as cousins you don’t see very often. i actually managed this for the first time this afternoon, and it helps

Someone once said that being a child was like being insane. If that’s the case, then maturing can be thought of as becoming sane. This all makes sense to me–my notion of some crazy includes doing things seemingly without reason, and children seem to do the same. At some point the search for meaning sets in, and thereafter we all need motivations and reasons for doing anything. What perplexes me is how in my own mind I can not have changed the way I perceive the world, just the way I analyze it, in growing up. Then again, memory is faulty.