Saturday November 6, 2004 – The Virus of Humanity

Saturday November 6, 2004 – The Virus of Humanity

What is the meaning of life? After living over a half a century you would think I would have gained some insight into that question but all I can offer is observations about what I’ve seen over that long period of time. The first realization everyone coming into the world realizes is that life is about struggle. When our oldest daughter was born and I first saw that frail little being, I saw a creature that had just undergone a struggle that is inconceivable to most adults: the Herculean battle to be born. And she showed the effects of that protracted conflict, lasting from late afternoon to just after midnight. Her wee face was squeezed and reddened with one eye slightly swollen and nearly shut. Looking at the picture taken of her only moments old, she had the appearance of a boxer after a grueling fight.

Think about the fact that coming into this world is a monumental struggle and only those hardy enough to withstand its rigors survive. As I was holding my daughter for the first time, I was struck by how solid she was. And when she kicked her leg or moved her arm, there was force in the movements that belied her frail appearance. While our M took her time coming into the world, our daughter R was having none of that. My wife “I” spent a full day of contractions before she suddenly sensed that R was on her way. And she was not going to take her time about coming either. Within an hour, “I” was in an ambulance being rushed from her doctor’s office in Plano, Texas to the hospital in Richardson less than 10 miles south. She made it out of the ambulance and delivered within minutes of entering the delivery room.

Looking at both my daughters immediately after their birth, I was struck by the fact that neither of us knew the other. We were no different than two siblings suddenly meeting decades after being separated at birth. Both my daughters and I were blood kin and we each knew it instinctively, knew that we had a bond, that held us to one another, but we were strangers. Both the kids were lucky in that neither could talk and it was left for the parents to try to make the first step in getting child and parent to know one another.

But, wait, I’m getting off onto a tangent. When each of my wee babies looked up at me for the first time, they knew nothing of me, nothing of their surroundings, nothing of the bright, noisy place they had just entered. At this point, their only concern was comfort, food, and absence of pain. Everything else was gratuitous input for an extraordinarily absorbent mind. If they were not comfortable, they felt pain, or they were hungry, they did the only thing they could at that young age to address the problem they cried and they struggled as best their muscular but uncoordinated body could. And I understood they wanted and felt in their physical exertion the magnitude of that want.

The struggle does not end at childbirth. It continues on as the child fights to get control of its limbs, first the neck, then the arms, and finally the legs. You watch as they learn to roll, then to crawl, and eventually to walk. At each stage in their evolution, you see this creature wrestling to control itself first physically, then emotionally. Many mistakes result in pain, falling down after standing upright for the first time, rolling off a bed onto a carpeted floor and sensing the sensation of gravity and coping with the physics of collision… The two strangers in a strange land learning what causes pain and is to be avoided—fire, electric power outlets, stairs,… Much of a child’s early life is confronting and overcoming the hazards of the world they encounter. I recall the scraped knees, the bloody lip, and many other childhood injuries I cringe over now in retrospect. But they survived them all and learned from each how to avoid the hazard the next time.

This whole process of banging into the hidden traps continues your whole life. I remember our daughters’ first cars and the accidents each had in them, neither resulting in injury, though my daughter R totaled an Oldsmobile Cutlass ramming a light pole sideways as the car fish tailed during a u-turn on a rain slick road. To what purpose is all of this anguish intended? I see both our daughters now with children of their own, carrying on in pretty much the same fashion as we did with them. But the world we reside in now is entirely different from the world we inhabited when they were both infants. Their generation and the one between theirs and ours have made the world different, not better, not worse, just different and the same will be the case for their children and so on.

Humans are no different than the viruses that inhabit a host, proliferate, and die. The time scale is much compressed compared with humans. But the effect is the same. Earth is the host and we are the colonizing virus. We’re consuming our host, which is mindless to our presence. Earth will remain long after the virus of humankind has ceased to be just as the host remains in the wake of a spent virus. The larger question is why the virus, why the humans? Just as the right conditions allow the virus to thrive in its host, so too the ideal conditions of earth, enable humankind to propagate at a geometric rate. Without the ideal conditions, human would cease just like the virus. Is it the lucky roll of the dice that we are the cells in this elaborate virus? Or is their divine providence guiding the continuing struggle of humankind?