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I’m in transition. This isn’t a new thing for me or my peers or, dare I say it, for anybody. Our lives aren’t composed of neat narrative arcs; we exist, rather, in a persistent state of constant, inescapable flux. We can strive for stability—I certainly do—but stable and static are not the same thing. To demonstrate the ubiquity of this situation, place yourself, for a moment, in the diamond-soled shoes of the Cullinan Diamond. Weighing in at over 3,000 carats, you are the largest known specimen of the hardest Earthly substance. It took over a billion years for the lithospheric inferno to forge you and force you through a hundred miles of magma and bedrock to the surface. After such a stressful and monumental journey, you’d be forgiven for taking a knee for a few billion more, wiping the sweat from your scintillating brow, and thanking the stars that your trials were at an end—except, of course, that your transformation wasn’t done. In 1905 an Englishman plucked you from the ground, shipped you halfway across the world, and, without so much as “Kiss my foot” or “Have an apple”, carved you up into a hundred pieces. All that strife, only to end up glued into the crown jewels with a whole mess of lesser jewels. Some of your smaller shards, set in a long platinum chain, are never even worn because you “get in the soup.”
And even after all of that, in your climate-controlled cell in the Tower of London, your atomic structure is eroding bit by bit. Over a timescale not measurable by mortal instruments, your precious faceted face will fade into graphite. From a girl’s best friend to pencil lead. You’re the biggest, toughest hunk of material on the planet, and even you can’t stop changing. Turns out diamonds are not forever. But maybe that’s too material and hard-cut, so let me propose an alternative thought experiment. Every metaphor falls apart under enough scrutiny, but bear with me. It’s a tale marginally brighter than that of the Cullinan Diamond, and its star is a little livelier. The date is 8/12/44,997,994 BCE, 6:45 AM Central Time, and you just budded. Happy birthday! Weighing in at 1.76*10-13 pounds and measuring 7.3 microns across (a little small, but not unhealthy), you let out a tiny hiccup and begin to wail. Or you would, if you had any organs, but you don’t, because you’re yeast, the latest addition to a proud lineage of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. And life is short, so you’d best get busy with living. You find some sugar, you eat some sugar, you clone yourself—standard behavior for a young yeast. Your friends are secretly jealous of your success. Your parent is proud (which, given your asexual reproductive process, has some serious narcissistic implications). After your third bout of self-procreation, though, out of nowhere, a sticky golden tide engulfs your tiny single-celled body and hardens, freezing you in place. Locked away from nourishment and the outside world, you panic. You shut down and lie dormant, not feeding, not breeding, not creating, just…existing. Then, in 1995 CE, a paleontologist cracks open your amber shell and you take a (metaphorical) breath for the first time in 45 million years. The air smells worse than when you went in, but the windows in your previous residence were painted shut and unopenable, so you don’t even care. 11 years later—not that long, given what you’ve been through—a burgeoning microbrewer immerses you in an impressive cocktail of treats and hey, it’s been a while since you’ve had a good meal, so you go to town. You get your groove back. You start dating again. The result: Fossil Fuels pale ale. After eons of stagnation, you’re still capable of producing something wonderful. So yeah. I’m in transition. I probably won’t be around for billions of years; I’m rather squishier than the Cullinan Diamond and have a few more moving parts than a yeast. I doubt I’ll warrant preservation in the Tower of London or make the front page of Wired, but that’s fine by me. What sets me apart—and what really matters, in my eyes—is the capacity to steer my changes. Politically, I’m activating (or trying to). Socially, my circles are slowly coming into focus. Physically, I continue the steady march towards gains (I’m also trying to both gain mass and run more, which is a fun circle to square). Creatively, my acting is creeping along slower than I’d like, but other endeavors are blossoming and keep me sated. I don’t know where I’m headed. I’m not sure what the future holds. No one can be—“the best-laid plans” and all that. What we can do is sow the seeds we want to reap, fertilize the soil, keep an eye out for weeds, and watch our harvest grow. (Short aside: check out Dan Ariely’s interview in this episode of the TED Radio Hour. He and Guy discuss creating an environment that enables positive choices; it’s tangential, but topical) Turritopsis dohrnii is a species of jellyfish found in the Mediterranean and around Japan, and it can live forever. It cycles back and forth between newborn polyp and maturity, rendering it theoretically immortal—and yet, notably, never static. The essence of existence is change; the key to longevity is adaptation, evolution. We humans are not so genetically gifted as our tentacled friend—but we also only have to suffer through puberty once, so I’ll take it.
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