Sapiens

I am sitting in my living room. I watch hot steam curl from my coffee mug into the dark. A sliver of pink glances against the horizon outside my window. 

A new dawn.

It always takes me a while to settle into a routine away from school. I am just so driven during the school year. Driven by my love of learning, by my perfectionism, by my desire to do EVERYTHING, by my students, by my colleagues. I just never stop. (Every day I'm hustlin').

But here I am, embracing the stillness of dawn.

Since break began six days ago I've been working my way through Noah Yuval Harari's book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. The book highlights so many of the complicated (and in many cases downright coincidental) origins of how and why we are the way we are as humans. 

One of the most stirring realizations I've had is that we aren't meant to be so overwhelmed. It's just not the way we were originally made. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors, for example, actually didn't work all that much. The common misperception is that they spent all day, backs to the sun, gathering and hunting all in the effort to survive. Really, though, they were communal and differed from their neanderthal cousins because of their propensity for storytelling and imagining. Yet it was that very trait (imagination) that allowed them to become so complicated, to develop social hierarchies based upon social imaginaries, and to care deeply about invisible things like numbers.

And here I am, knocking on the door of the year 2018 C.E. This is the present tense of our history as humans, and out there somewhere my students are living their lives and loving the people around them. Sure, there are things that are stressing them out and things that are making them more busy than they'd like, but I hope--like me--they are finding time to sit and be still. Finding time to merely exist. Because many of us have the convenience and privilege to not have to worry about survival...we can take time to reflect and imagine and to turn off our devices and wait for something, anything (a drawing, a poem, a recipe, a game, a conversation, a cuddle with a pet, a walk in the cold) to draw us in and to serve as a catalyst for a new idea that's never existed.

Our lives are written in the present tense, but we make it so complicated. We've got these beautiful sapien brains that can create so much. Here are the two results of our human imagination that have inspired me most in the past week (this and this other one). It makes me think of the wonderful line penned by Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations: 

“Revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new technologies—it happens when society adopts new behaviors.”

Here's to our collective potential as humankind. Let's slow down and let our imaginations run.