The Animal Inside Us
Our society and system has cut us off from being able to use our advanced adaptive skills - our ability to navigate, track, forage, orient ourselves with just our senses - I can’t even list all we’ve been deprived of because being raised within the system, we don’t know the full range of our senses that we would’ve had otherwise. This system puts us in a house, or an office, or a car, inside an urban sprawl where you can’t see much further than the next block, let alone everything within the block is covered in cement and domesticated trees…let alone most of us when we’re anywhere new are focused on our GPS - not needing to look outside the dotted lines on the road.
Being human in this society is like driving a Ferrari in a school zone. We have all these powerful senses and nowhere natural to engage them. And by covering up the land in cement and skyscrapers, you cover up the micro expressions of nature. It’s like pumping Botox into the face and not being able to observe the micro expressions - the most truthful communication of all. It cuts us off from being able to see for ourselves what’s really going on and make our own choices based off reality and provides us with a manufactured version instead - an illusion covering up the authentic.
It’s like putting a whale in a pool - cutting off their abilities to use their sonar detection - not only do they lose the free range and beauty of the ocean, but they lose the need and ability and purpose to use their own senses - the textures, the hunt, the communication skills between each other from oceans away. And if you do a quick google search on the effects of domesticating whales, the symptoms are strikingly similar to the behaviors in our society as a whole. Poor diet, stress, sickness, boredom, depression, aggression, and ironically, living longer - which the last one, of course, is a perk, but at what cost? The cost of our mental health? The cost of other species? The cost of the planet? The cost of our freedom?
Health professionals have all these recommendations for how much time we need to be spending in nature - “30 minutes a day” “an hour a day” - but it’s not enough. Our bodies evolved to be immersed in nature and the rate that culture has progressed us into a technology-dependent world is dulling our long developed skills and trading them for microchips. Are we breeding ourselves to be content living inside a cage?
If we could accept the animal part of ourselves, embrace it, maybe we would be able to accept and embrace the environment we were built for for us to thrive in. Maybe then we would be able to protect it, nurture it, empower it, and see in doing so, we would be simultaneously protecting, nurturing, and empowering ourselves.
