Island of Desire

Egg Hunt
It all began with a swimming contest. 300,000,000 of you were released at once. It was a no-holds-barred race to see who could reach the egg first. This was no sack race at the family barbecue. It was more like an episode of the Hunger Games. Only a few dozen would even reach the egg. Among those, there would be just one winner.

You wriggled with all your might, shoving the others aside. Right out of the gate, millions were poisoned by the acidic environment of the vagina. Others got stuck in mucous. Some were destroyed when the immune system mistook them for enemy invaders. Half of them went up the wrong fallopian tube. You survived all this. You swam like hell.

However disenchanted you may be with life today, you should know that there was a time when you wanted to live so badly that your outran 300,000,000 others. You were the first to poke your head through the soft skin of the egg and claim your prize.

The egg was a winner in its own right, chosen from 2,000,000 entrants. The odds that the two of you would get together were one in six hundred trillion. Your prize was union. Your DNAs intertwined and you became a new you, the very one that is listening to these words right now.

You made your way through the warm watery, darkness and established your new home in the uterine lining of the womb. You became fruitful and multiplied, creating millions of cells, each stamped with your unique recipe. These cells grouped together, as if by magic, into physical forms, shifting from an unrecognizable blob, to a fetus, to a baby.

You like being in there, attached by an umbilical cord to the wall of your mother’s womb. It was a sweet setup, maybe too sweet. You grew too large. The walls began to press against you. Your mother’s stomach stretched and strained to make space.

You twisted and turned and kicked. You heard muffled sounds of astonishment from the outside. You kicked harder. Something out there pushed back. It was your father, placing his hand on your mother’s stomach for his first touch of you.

Eviction
Then, without warning, you were unceremoniously evacuated. There was no eviction notice. No graduation ceremony. You had no idea where you were going or if you would even survive.

Leaving the womb was not easy. The exit was far too small. You squirmed to avoid leaving, but powerful powerful contractions forced you to exit. Your mother screamed. Your head was getting squashed. Everything was getting squashed. This went on for hours. Finally, with a heroic shriek, your mother gave one last push and you plopped out into a new world with a gush of amniotic fluid and blood.

Some mammals have the sense to enter the world with their eyes shut but you came out looking, squinting at the brightness. It was a blur of sensations: beeping of hospital instruments, a pale green delivery room an odor of sweat and chemicals.

The doctor picked you up and cradled you in his hands. He poked and prodded, checking you out. Are you okay? No! He whacked you on the butt. You gasped at the unprovoked attack—your first breath, along with your first life lesson.

The umbilical cord still stretched from your stomach into your mother’s womb. The doctor put a cold metal clamp on it, stopping the life flow. With a pair of scissors he cut the cord and tied it in a knot. You were on your own.

Hunger and thirst, heat and cold, distress and comfort. All was desire. You moved instinctively away from from pain toward pleasure. You put your thumb in your mouth and sucked. It offered comfort but did nothing to satisfy your appetite.

Your mother offered you her breast. You latched on and sucked for dear life. At first, it was a dry as your thumb. You didn’t give up. With persistence, sweet, warm milk began to flow. In time, you discovered additional ways to satisfy your desire. Your mother placed baby food on your tongue. You learned to swallow.

Sometimes in the darkness there was an ache that nothing could satisfy. You cried. Your parents came in your room and tried to find the problem. They checked your diaper. Made sure you weren’t cold. Fed you. The ache was still there. Your father took a turn. He held you and sat down in a rocking chair to rock you. He promised that everything was okay, that all would be well.

It wasn’t okay and you weren’t well. The whole situation was outrageous. You longed for the security and comfort of the womb. You wanted to speak with the Manager. The Manager was unavailable. You would have to settle for your father’s promises. To his great relief, you finally became exhausted and fell asleep.

Space
For a while, all you perceived was a two dimensional blur of shapes and colors but in time, you began to recognize patterns: the contour of your mother’s face, the bars of your crib, the texture of the walls. You stretched out your arm to touch, watching your fingers wiggling. You rolled from side to side: camera left, camera right.

One day, you did something new: you rolled from your back onto your stomach and got up on all fours, crawling around the crib like a bug in a mayonnaise jar. Two dimensions became three. Your mother lifted you from the crib and let you crawl on the floor. Your universe expanded. Would you ever find an edge?

Time
There were not only patterns to your physical world. Each day brought darkness and light, sleeping and waking. Time was a river, always flowing. There was no stopping it and no making it go backwards. You found the rhythm and settled into the flow. Eat, sleep, poop, play. You weren’t the only thing on the move. The whole world was in motion. Everything was on the go, dancing down the river from this moment to the next.

Language
In addition to the patterns of space and time, you learned the patterns of sound. You recognized your parent’s voices. The barking of the dog. Somewhere after your first year, you put it together: people assigned certain sounds to certain objects.

One monumental day, you joined them. You spoke your first word: “Mama.” It was as though you had come out of a coma. She was so excited that she called your father to tell him. You’d think you had taken your first step on the moon. Your vocabulary grew: Cow says “moo!” The duck says “quack.”

You now had all the elements of the story: three dimensions to build a set, time to forge a plot, and language to describe the characters and events. Nursery rhymes showed you how this was done:

The itsy bitsy spider went up the waterspout
Down came the rain and washed the spider out
Up came the sun and dried up all the rain
The itsy bitsy spider went up the spout again

It sounded fun. You were too young to know that the poor spider was Sisyphus.

Self-Awareness
There weren’t just words for everything you saw. There was also a very special word for the one thing you couldn’t see: yourself. Your parents pointed at you and made a noise. That noise was your name. That noise was you.

You became self-aware, a switch hitter, able to play both subject and object. As subject, you could look out on your world and make observations. As object you could step into the world and reflect on yourself. This raised all kinds of questions. In the simple statement, “I am me,” Who is the “I?” Who is the “me?” Who is talking?

The usual word for this mystery of awareness is “consciousness.” There are many theories about how consciousness arises, what it is, and who has it. The one thing just about everyone agrees on is that, whatever it is, humans have it. It didn’t spring up overnight. It appeared along with our expanding awareness.

Consciousness was a gift and a curse. You loved your expanded universe but there were times when you longed for the simplicity of your infant days, when all was desire. But like it or not, here you were. Just as the walls of your mothers’ wombs became too small, so you outgrew the island of pure desire. Ready or not you were facing another eviction. You would be on the next boat to the Island of Story.