I have in in some past posts looked at my fellow humans and asked, "why do they do that?" This time, I want to ask, "Why did Nature/God/the Universe do that?" These are questions we rarely ask because they involve the given ground rules for our being. This, however, does not stop these questions from arising for me, so here I go.
SLEEP. Let me begin by saying that I love sleep. I love crawling between clean sheets and arranging a nest of pillows. I love leaving the waking world for a while and, on a good night, waking up refreshed. But last night as I got into bed, adjusted my pillows, and put earbuds in to listen to a podcast that would, hopefully, ease me into sleep, it suddenly occurred to me how odd it is that we willingly lie down and make ourselves defenseless and vulnerable for 6 to 8 of every 24 hours. (And, mind you, we humans generally do this when the world is in darkness, adding to the vulnerability.)
If you were designing say, an electronic device, would you create something that was incapable of functioning for one-third of every day while recharging?
SEX. Yep. I like sex too. I like the intimacy. I like the pleasure. And it is a good way to leave behind the petty annoyances that can wear on a relationship. But, face it, there must be a less-complicated way to reproduce. I think my eldest came up with the best response to the oddity that is sex when she was four. After asking her father how a baby gets into "the baby tummy," and being told the daddy has a seed and the mommy has an egg, she waited exactly one day to ask me how the seed got to the egg. When I told her, she responded, "Penis in vagina--that's too silly for me." And so it is, when looked at from the point of view of one who has yet to experience its pleasures.
FOOD. Again, I like to eat, although I don't much enjoy preparing food. (Click here for a description of my freakish cooking jag early in the pandemic.) I love Mexican food. And Italian food. I love chocolate. And I have missed gathering with family or friends over a meal during this pandemic. But would you drive a car if it required you to spend hours every week shopping for and preparing its fuel?
ELIMINATION. This inevitable aftermath of eating food as fuel is a very complicated process, requiring (for humans) toilets and sewer systems in order to avoid disease. And then there are our pets - We need poop bags for dogs and kitty litter for cats. I can't believe that Nature could not have come up with a better system. Couldn't she have set us up with the equivalent of an oil change every six months and left it at that?
CLOTHING AND SHELTER: How come we are the only animal designed with a need for multiple garments to protect our skin and keep us warm? And don't we win the award for elaborate shelters? Perhaps the Universe wanted to give us something to do with our time. (As if the food thing weren't already keeping us busy enough.) And, yes, there is creativity here -- fashion design and architecture, for starters. Look, I love my home and am willing to clothe myself, but couldn't the powers that be have provided us with the basics -- kind of like a minimum income, only in this case it would be minimum bodily protection, so that a huge swath of humanity wouldn't have to suffer during temperature extremes?
It would seem that Nature has set us down without protection and with a whole bunch of complicated needs and let us have at it to see how we would fare.
How would you say the experiment is going so far?
I have wondered about this too. Have you ever had to pee really bad PLUS been desperately thirsty? How come we can't run the waterworks backward and quench our thirst from within?
ReplyDeleteGreat design suggestion. I'll send it upstairs.
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