So the journey continues to try to make sense of the situation, at least in so far as necessary to find some way to respond, and choosing how to act in the situation.
Maybe really making sense of it isn’t the word, because our ability to really understand something, make sense of it, can often be far behind the simply living within it and acting within it.
We have to choose how to act before we can make sense of what’s going on, because making sense of some kind of surprising, strange situation can take a very long time, but we have to, before very long at all, start finding some way to act within it.
So what I’m thinking about now is this idea of adaptation.
So we are able to adapt to many new situations.
This is a great feature, perhaps of all life itself, certainly of the human life, that we have an ability to somehow, whenever situations, change we can find some way to change ourselves, change the way we behave, so that we can succeed, survive at least, if not do well, in the new situation.
And, you know, maybe that’s the history of life and evolution itself, that as situations change, new forms of life that are better adapted to the new situation tend to take over, and those that cannot adapt tend to fade away and disappear.
So this is what’s happening right now.
We have a new situation.
A new situation is happening, and we now have the ability to adapt.
You could say, at least, we have the opportunity to adapt.
And we do have the ability just like all life, just as, in so far as we are alive, we are living beings, we have the ability to adapt to some degree.
Now, of course, we have our limits.
There are limits to what we can adapt to.
We can’t, you know, live without water or, you know, in a burning fire or whatever.
There are the limits to what we can adapt to.
But we’re nowhere near those limits.
The physical limits of the organism, like I have to live within a certain temperature, I need to have certain nutrition to be able to survive: those are hard limits.
But in terms of what kind of a social world we can live in, what kind of rules and systems that we can live within, it can get way, way, way stranger than it is now before it’s outside the limits of survivability.
This is just a new configuration, a changed configuration of the systems for, and the arrangement of, how we live.
And it’s absolutely within our powers to adapt to it.
What seems to be holding back, holding us back, is that I really don’t want to.
I mean, I don’t want to adapt.
I don’t want to change my system.
You know, we spent our whole lives getting adjusted and adapted to the situation as it was.
And of course, it’s always changing, it’s never the same.
And you can especially see that with technology, the very fast change of technology we’ve adapted to, the slower state of social and cultural change that we’ve to some degree adapted to.
And all sorts of things are constantly changing, and we’re constantly adapting to them.
But now we just get this shock change, a shock change where we are forced to have a high-speed adaptation.
You know, maybe it’s like the meteor hitting, you know, that it killed the dinosaurs.
The dinosaurs couldn’t adapt.
But then the little mammals adapted.
So the story goes.
Big meteor comes, changes the Earth’s climate, the big dinosaurs die off, but the little mouse-like mammals are able to thrive in this new environment with the dinosaurs died off, and then they rise and evolve to become the wonderful thinking apes that we are now.
So maybe that’s where we are now, that we’ve been hit by a change, and now we need to somehow, one way or another, find ways to adapt.
So will we be the dinosaur or the mouse? Or some completely other animal that we can’t even imagine? I don’t know how to adapt.
I don’t know how this is gonna happen.
But somehow, one way, or another we will find ways to adapt to the changed situation.
#adaptation #adapt #survival