Enough

Antarctica. Nine months. I suppose it doesn’t seem like the longest time in the world, until you really think about how much happens. It’s enough for an entirely new human being to develop and be born. Nine months to exist. And yet I feel like the last nine months is when I’ve finally felt like it.

            I came home and realized the truth. Everything had changed – to me. But everything here was exactly the same as I’d left it. Family and friends behaving the same as they always had, the same problems they work hard to chip away at until solved. I put on the best face I knew they liked to see, but deep down it was I who had changed completely.

            Being out in the Antarctic when it was hospitable was an awe-inspiring experience; when inhospitable, it was intensely humbling. There nature is so raw, barely touched by mankind, left to its own devices, beauty isn’t the exception, it’s not an option, it is the only choice. Beauty is all that land is, and to attempt to chain it in the society of mankind is your own undoing.

            One of my nights there I stepped outside and looked up at the stars, and damn near felt like I’d have fallen up into space if I’d have jumped. There is nothing on that continent but majesty, after nine months there that’s what I can tell you people research down there. Dress it up in whatever science or math you like, but Antarctica is an embodiment of this universe. What those people down there are studying is art, plain and simple.

            From the few species of animal life that capably survive it to the abandoned whaling cities that evidence our inability to handle what nature is, I learned who I am down there without society telling me who to be.

            I learned that I am a human being who gives a great big damn about this world that we human beings so desperately need. As a species we walk around like the mountains and wildlife were left here to decorate our path, but the closer we get to bleeding the planet dry the more I realize we aren’t hurting it at all.

            We’re the ones that put value in a handful of resources that it produces, we’re the ones that go around saying we have to keep the earth in good shape for our children for generations to come; yet we can’t guarantee our bloodlines will continue, and we can’t guarantee we can change anything for this earth.

            This earth doesn’t need us any more than we need a diamond on our finger. Watching the wind blow the snow against a herd of penguins tells you all you need to know. This earth has a beautiful, terrible personality that is as expressive as it is apathetic to the creatures that eke out a living over its surface. The earth doesn’t evolve to us, we have to evolve to it, and I think that right there is exactly what people shouldn’t ever forget.

            I learned a lot about being a human being there, about how I think about everything and yet it’s all so trivial when you imagine how we’ll all be dead and eventually the human race will also be dead and everything that we think is important won’t matter to anyone. There won’t be anyone for it to matter. And perhaps it’s just as well.

            Everything ends, and I’m just here to enjoy it while I can, while there’s something to enjoy. I watched the penguins and other life there, and now that I’m back I more carefully observe animals here too. They’re all the same, really. They’re not out to war with each other over things they’ve made up in their minds. They find no importance in anything they don’t directly need.

            I’ve grown to think of myself simply as a mammal on this earth, looking for my own place to be, and to be myself within it. I exist, and if that isn’t enough for anyone, then what is?