The Fourth Thing

Biologists tell us that all animals have three primal drives. Food, shelter, and reproduction. Being animals, this is what we are driven to do. Find food. Find shelter. Reproduce.

I believe that there's something more, a fourth drive, that makes us uniquely human. Curiosity. Along with food, shelter, and family, we seek a fourth thing. Knowledge. Turtles don't ponder the meaning of existence. Cows don't look up at night and wonder what stars are. People do. But, as Thomas Edison once said, "We don't know a millionth of one percent about anything."


He was right. We know next to nothing. We don't know what life is. Or love. Or consciousness. Or electricity. Or gravity. Or even light. We barely understand what's in our own backyards, and there's so much more out there. Think about this. In the very small town where I live, the library has 74,144 books. Just books in print, mind you, I'm not counting books on tape, CDs, or anything else they have. Just books. 74,144. If you read one book a day, for one hundred years, you won't have even reached the halfway point. The entire world, even the smallest parts of it, is filled with things you don't know. Even the things we think we know, we are often wrong. Everything we know about history, we've learned in the past 200 years. Compared with the billions of years our planet has been around, we've barely existed. And for most of that time, we were mute and illiterate.


Now, we have language. We have culture. We have civilization. And where has it gotten us? Nowhere. We've already started to forget. To stain English with slang. To turn art into offensive doodles. To degrade music to the point of grunting and heavy beats.

I was told once by a friend of mine that we have no purpose on Earth but to learn. I disagreed, but I understand, for isn't that what we do? Learn from everything. Hold to that thirst for knowledge! There is so much more to learn, see, and do! Knowledge is never perfect. It always entails the possibility of mistake. Risk it. It's part of being human. Knowledge is in our destinies.

This is Ourselves

"It's the terror of knowing what this world is about, watching some good friends scream, 'Let me out!' "-Under Pressure ( Queen and David Bowie)

Everyday, we're put under an enormous amount of pressure. Judgments, expectations, limits, responsibilities, luck. For me, it's judgments. Why is it that society expects girls to have long hair? Yes, scientifically speaking, it's more attractive, (see Evolution of Attraction) but what law binds us to be attractive?

My new haircut is shorter then I've ever had it, barely covering my ears. My neck is shorn and the curls press close to my head. It roughly resembles a flapper from the 1920s. Vintage meets modern. It's perfectly me, but it's also terribly out of style. In today's world, short hair is childish, and with my old fashioned curls, I just can't wear it long. I'm forever "cute". I'm always going to look younger. I'll never fit society's definition of "beautiful".

For others, it's pressure in a different way. A close friend of mine just broke up with his girlfriend of two years. Pressure. Guilt, responsibilities, and heartbreak. My comfort is in vain. No matter how many times I tell him it simply wasn't meant or that it wasn't his fault, he doesn't listen. Quoting "Under Pressure" again... "Love dares you to care for the people on the edge of the night and love dares you to change our way of caring about ourselves. "

Pressure or not, he refuses to let me help. He's convinced that I don't understand. I want to roll up my sleeves and show him my own scars, figuratively, of course, but I cannot. And so comes back the curse of age. Yes, I'm younger, but I'm far from naive and immature. Just this once, I wish I was older and he was younger, and I could comfort him.

"This is our last dance. This is ourselves, under pressure."