Imagine if children, and thus human beings in general, never learned how to control their bladders.
You’re
standing in a conference room, making a presentation to your peers and
coworkers. Behind you, projected on the wall, is a PowerPoint
screen outlining your company’s financial performance during the second
fiscal quarter, a morass of graphs and pie charts and labyrinthine
corporate lingo. You’re clicking along from slide to slide, in command
of the room and the material, feeling puffed up
and important in your tailored suit. You’re rockin’ this. Your boss is
smiling approvingly, and you finally catch a whiff of that long-awaited
promotion.
Then
you catch a whiff of something else. You feel an involuntary release,
and falter slightly, stopping short in the middle of your spiel
about the monthlong spike in web traffic. With the dawning realization
of what just happened, you begin to cry.
“What’s wrong, Johnson?” asks the senior vice president.
“I peed!” you wail. The presentation grinds to a halt because you’ve stopped to suck your thumb.
Then a staccato, jackhammer brrrrrap! emits from your backside, and all hell breaks loose.
Welcome to an alternate universe ruled by babies.
We’re
born into this world partially formed, the womb having taken us only so
far. The real work is still ahead of us: learning to crawl, to
walk, to pontificate on the collected works of J.D. Salinger. One by
one we pick up these various skills of personhood, and as time passes we
slowly start to resemble what most of us consider a normal, functioning
homo sapien, with our button-up dress shirts
and well-mannered bodily functions. Just grabbing hold of the basics is
a years-long process, and so by the time we stand up in that conference
room and blast off into our PowerPoints, it’s frankly amazing that we
have the wherewithal to keep it all together.
Think of all the careers that could easily be ruined with an ill-timed,
cacophonous fart.
Humans
aren’t the only animals that need extensive life skills training, but
other species seem to have expedited the process. Look at cats.
A newborn kitten is all squinty and half-blind, wholly unable to engage
in full-grown cat stuff, like pouncing on insects and disdaining
everything. But it doesn’t take long to get up to speed. A few short
months pass and they’re using their litter boxes as
though it’s hardwired into their DNA, batting at strings like they’ve
been trained in yarn-swatting by a battle-tested samurai. Heck, even a
day-old runt will claw your hand if you try to get all up in their
business. Ninjas from the word go, these cats. Someone
ought to steal the feline training manual, ’cause they’ve streamlined
the whole endeavor -- no diapers or training wheels for these suckers,
no siree. Give ’em a can of tuna and warm bed and they’re masters of the
freakin’ universe.
I
was watching a National Geographic special about northern Canadian
wildlife a few months ago (the Playstation was on the fritz), and the
documentary crews went around placing hidden cameras in the wilderness
to capture the natural living patterns of deer. If cats speed toward
maturation in a souped-up Camaro, deer are on a bullet train. It took a
single afternoon for a newborn calf to start
walking. At first its movements were awkward and gangly -- it was like
watching a scarecrow huffing through an obstacle course after sucking
down a half-bottle of Jagermeister -- but soon it was bounding across
the plains with grace and confidence.
It
would be a whole different world if human babies matured at the same
rate. Let’s examine this hypothetical reality for a second. Assume
you’ve got a new baby named Horatio. Fresh from the oven, he looks like
any other baby: Round head, chubby cheeks, facial features scrunched
like the puckered navel of a belly dancer. That’s at 9 a.m. By 11 o’clock he’s on his feet, waddling along your living
room carpet with a stabilizing hand on your coffee table. He utters his first word at noon
(“compartmentalize”), graduates to sounding out R.L Stine novels by 1,
can play basic scales on a violin by 2, and has enrolled in the fourth
grade by mid-afternoon,
which has inspired him to work on his long division. He practices
equations until dinnertime, where he spends most of the meal picking
bread crumbs out of his beard.
Canadian deer, meet your human counterpart, Horatio Growsfast III.
That’s
one extreme; the conference room scenario described above is the other.
We sit comfortably in between, of course, with our
development-conscious
school grading system and age-appropriate sex education pamphlets. As a
society we’ve grown accustomed to a certain pace and rhythm when it
comes to maturation, but what we rarely think about is that everything,
every aspect of our lives, is based on something
over which we have no biological control. We can’t make PowerPoint
presentations when we’re still in diapers, and we can’t learn to shave
on the same day we start walking. It’s impossible. We’re slaves, in a
sense, to our own biologies, and to time -- always
to time, that equalizer of all things.
As
human beings live longer, the checkpoints may shift a bit; we’re seeing
this already, with adolescence sometimes stretching into people’s
20s (guilty), and grown professionals showing up to work in cargo
shorts and band T-shirts (also guilty). But that just further proves the
point: People take their sweet time. Assuming we haven’t destroyed
ourselves in the next 400 years, we’ll probably still
be breathing at 150 and living with our parents until we’re old enough
to qualify for Medicare.
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