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Once is Never Enough Posting Date: Mar 30 2009 10:07AM Just in case you have never run a marathon or you happen to be from Kenya, here’s what should go through your mind the first time you cross a finish line at the end of a twenty-six mile run: “I am not doing that again.”
That’s also what goes through your mind when you finish your second marathon.
Why do we do things repeatedly when we know they are painful, counterintuitive, illogical, expressly forbidden or just plain stupid?
It’s because we used to be fish. We used to be fish or squirrels or monkeys or salamanders or shrimp or amoebae or cumquats or whatever we were before we evolved into the glory that is us, so we try again. Think about this for a second … you’re a prehistoric jellyfish. You float through the gigantic oceans of yesteryear dodging meteors and supersized squids and flesh-eating beavers the size of jumbo jets. You drift aimlessly on the currents created by dinosaur farts and you bob up and down on seas made rough by volcanic winds. Your mind is blank and stress-free, your heart is pure, your personal karmic ledger is unblemished. You lead the dream life of any simple organism. Your basic needs are met. Your ambitions are low, which is good because so are your abilities. A complete inventory of your skills includes: floating, bobbing, drifting, sinking, swirling and protoplasmic pooping. Really, you are in every way, underwhelming, but you are happy.
Sort of like Stephen Harper.
But then one day, the forces of the seas push you gently aground. You have never experienced land before, though you have heard talk of it before, the chit-chat among the ancient krill – those inveterate and invertebrate chatterboxes – but never before experienced it first-hand.
Suddenly, the water ebbs away leaving your little gelatinous self high-and-dry like a Cheerio stuck to the side of a bowl. You gasp. You feel your nice, supple collagen-like body shriveling rapidly into raisinity. Being on land is a living hell.
As the ocean laps back up the rocky shore, reclaiming your boogerish body back into the water, you think to yourself, “Won’t ever do that again,” but for some reason you must, because that jellyfish became Cro-magnon man in the blink of an evolutionary eye.
We run second marathons because that is what we do. It’s the defining characteristic of humanity, this willingness – even eagerness – to engage in behaviour previously proven to be patently ridiculous. You think a common house cat would put itself through four hours of marathon-running torture voluntarily? Cats claw out the eyes of their owners so they don’t have to take a three-minute bath. Run a marathon? I don’t think so.
But then pussy cats are hardly evolutionary wonders. Most of them can’t even work a toilet. For as much as we admire the haughty elegance of our feline friends, let’s keep in mind that the jumbo jet beaver would gorge itself silly on the great pussy cat buffet. The jumbo jet beaver is clearly physically superior to the common house cat, what with the beaver’s ten-foot front teeth, its tail like a tennis court and its chainsaw-like claws. The jumbo jet beaver could eat pussy cats like popcorn and build a beaver lodge with their bones.
Strictly speaking, the prehistoric jumbo jet beaver could do the same things to humans, but seriously … would we let him? I think not. Our evolutionary imperative has given us brains the size of watermelons. Our craniums are massive. We can think our way to inventing giant beaver defenses and then build them using our sneaky opposable thumbs. We can construct jumbo jet beaver repellents and jumbo jet beaver countermeasures designed to throw the crafty beaver off our highly-evolved scent, for the jumbo jet beaver is not only amply-toothed and nasty, but also bloodhound-like in its olfactory senses. We are able to make beaver guns and beaver bows and beaver bombs.
The jumbo jet beaver would not stand a chance against us because we, so many years ago, went up on the beach with our gooey little bodies for a second time and then eventually ran the marathon, again. |
