One day, 4.5 billion years ago, or so they think, the soup of the earth’s primordial oceans decided, with the right ingredients, to become life. It was so simple back then, a single cell, the grandmother of everyone and everything, the countless lives in their countless forms afterwards. Earth with a population of one.

Although, intellectually, I knew that _thought _and _feeling _and _knowing _itself probably came much later, I can’t help but wonder what grandmother cell felt. To suddenly exist when she didn’t exist before. Maybe that’s what it feels like to be born- this ancient knowledge of coming to being that’s lost on all of us the moment after we become. Darkness and then light. Void and then a star shining somewhere in the distance, then more stars, then a vast sky full of them, twinkling and burning out with new ones to take their places.

Of course, in the billions of years since then, entropy and evolution have had their way with things and everything has gotten more complicated. The enterprising nature of life finding new ways to move, to use resources, to one up each other. Single cells became multiple, and those self-organized into tissues, into organs, into organ systems, into overly complicated beings, who, in reality, are primordial soups all their own. Then, the watery surface of Earth gave way to soil and mountains and somehow, life found a way to walk on dry land. Life got smarter, more complex, and it just kept going, each iteration less refined in some ways, but more in others.

And then, at some point, we came along. Upright and relatively hairless, our brains our biggest asset and worst enemy all the same. I don’t think God had a hand in it. At least not in the sense so many Christians seem to think. No, for better or worse, we were always masters of our own destinies, at least that’s how I’ve seen it for most of my life. If the hand of God did lead us here, he’s not very good at planning. Either that, or his sense of humor is rather cruel and absurd. Or all of those at once.

Anyways, our strange species of overly-aggressive hairless apes eventually came to be in charge of things around here, or as much in charge as anyone can be with that pesky combination of random chance and the inability to know everything. Forces that have plagued us since before ‘us’ existed.

We’ve made quite a mess of things, but we’ve also managed to create a lot of beauty, a lot of humor, a lot of things that are probably only important to us, for us. Children entertaining each other with shadow puppets on a wall in a house with no grown ups present, a neighborhood beyond us in the dark, and more beyond that. The thought brought tears to my eyes for some reason, though I didn’t know what emotions those tears represented.

Stumbling forward through history, we created tools, both tangible and intangible, that unlocked new doors in the house or allowed us to explore the dark corners, eventually to go outside and explore beyond. Science, as iterative and time-bound as evolution, as reliant on repetition and failure and the occasional success. The process of learning what is by learning what isn’t. Our little flashlight in the darkness, illuminating so little, all in all, but allowing us to see *something* nonetheless. Religion and spirituality to speculate on what we don’t know yet, what we perhaps _can’t _know. Art to process it all, to fill and bridge the gaps.

And now, humanity, our great species of overgrown children playing dress up, could reach the stars. Or, in my clumsy analogy, we could explore beyond our house, beyond our neighborhood. But- and I wondered this so frequently that it drove me a little crazy- was it a good idea for us children to steal a car, venture out, and go knocking on doors in new neighborhoods, unknown houses? Maybe. Probably. But who could stop us? And grandmother cell… what would she think if she could see and know what her children have done?