Saw this article in the NYTimes and I thought, well duh. Don’t we know this? Don’t you feel that in your soul? Our bodies were meant to be moved, we are engineered to walk, to swing from trees, to swim in the oceans. Within all of us is our ancestors, the Savannah people of Africa. Within all of us is our ancestor, the Great Apes. Within all of us is our Ancestor, the reptiles who crawled out of the ocean. Within all of us is our Ancestors the fish. Within all of us is an organism that is one or two celled, dividing and uniting to form more and larger organisms.

You can see this in our brain. As Carl Sagan writes about in Dragons of Eden, we have the reptilian brain, the mammalian brain and most recently the neocortex: Consciousnes is thought to be a result of the neocortex. But the neocortex is on top of the other two levels of brain which developed first and which in all of us develops first. In fetal development we all go through stages where we are first a single cell, later a fish, later a mammal and finally human. All of these stages are necessary to go through to develop into a whole functioning human. Similarly all of the stages in evolution were necessary for the Human species to come around. The Universe had been around already for billions of years before humans came around. You can not rush something as magnificient as us, you can not skip steps and you cannot cheat biology.

All of our ancestors are creatures of motion, just as we are creatures of motion. It’s wonderful that we have developed elaborate cultures, arts, architecture. We have used our immense capacity for imagination, creativity and problem solving to build and change and inspire future generations. But never foroget what we are and how we got here. Never stop moving. The moment you stop moving is the moment you begin to die.

Stay mobiles, completely mobile. Stay fluid like water, stay flexible like a blade of grass, swing like a monkey, swim like a fish, run like a hunter. Exercise like your life depends on it, because it does.

Woah, I’m a 29 year old male, raised in a fairly traditional fully modernized western culture.  I’ve been agnostic my whole life.  One of those”show me evidence, I’ll believe it when I see it” types of people.  But recently, I’m starting to believe that there is magic in the world.  I’m writing to you from  four legged chair on a standard mac laptop at a stone, wood and glass cafe, completely sober(decaf coffee), and I feel like I’m floating in a breeze.

I don’t know how else to explain the sunset I saw last night, the three hour sunset over clouds that rolled like the ocean as my return flight followed the rotation of the sun.  I don’t know how else to explain the stranger who crossed my path and I followed for ten minutes while he thrashed his harmonica, walking and blowing at a ferocious pace.  I don’t know how else to explain the simple beauty and connection that I see in my lovers eyes even when she’s telling me that this can’t work out, we’re too different, there’s too much hurt to trust.

I like the idea of teleology, but I also think that in a sense, what we’re doing here is just freeing ourselves from the bullshit.  Freeing ourselves from a culture that wants to limit, that wants to repress and tell us not to be grand, not to think we have a mission, not to explore our gift to the world.  When I wrote my list, was that a cognitive process, or do my true desires flow from my soul?  If that is the case, and I’m thinking more and more that it is, then connecting to the default serves the purposes of accessing that gift, accessing our soul.  Asking the questions, what is it that I was put here to do and letting ourselves be swept up by the torrent of energy that propels us without effort in that direction.

I used to think that I was too old to believe in magic, but now I think, I’m too old to deny it.