I Swim

When tragedies struck, did the first peoples sense it was coming? What did they do? Did they try to stop the flood? Did they have life jackets?  If they did, how was it decided who would be saved first?  By rank?  I wonder how that turned out.

Long long ago before the interwebs, cars, and commerce, humans could sense a stampede of elephants too far off in the distance to see or hear; humans could feel when an avalanche was about to roll; dangers in the night were watched while the other eye slept. Humans didn't get a call ~ or a text ~ or a tweet ~ or an admirable sense of presence like a rock star.
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They ran for their lives and took what they could carry. It was nothing small that made them run. It was something that actually could kill them.
 
By and by, thousands of years go by and our human brains keep going through yet another puberty.
 
But here's the thing, whenever we feel the slightest draft of discomfort, our danger-sensing mechanism in our gut is flipped on. There is no dial. It is on, or off. There is no gauge.  The feeling of a word is distorted and we insist it's a spear.  We lose our balance and we look for a drove of wild boars.  We think the end is hear when it is the sound of a cliff falling.  

We know that tidal waves happen and there is little we can do to prepare.  It wasn't that long ago that a wild boar crashed through the walls of an airport into a crowd.  The Old Man of the Mountain collapsed in 2003. Repeatedly we mourn the suffering of children and then run to the safety of fiction.  
 
When we find ourselves in water that we don’t think we chose, swim like all life depended on it.

​#UUSelfie