Our visitors will find no evidence that other earth creatures – cats, fish, protozoa – suffered any such difficulty. One thing that might surprise them is that we really wanted to be more present, and we struggled to do so for some reason. There they will find direct evidence of what we yearned for and struggled with. Read MoreĪ million years from now, when alien anthropologists begin gathering evidence about what humans were like, they will definitely want to dig up the Self-help and Spiritual/Religion sections of our bookstores and libraries. I’ve never wanted a gold medal, but I’ve always wanted whatever quality it is that makes people want gold medals – or anything - that badly. They want to run or ski or pommel-horse until their bodies – not their minds – threaten to quit on them, if that’s the cost of a shot at a gold medal. On some level they must want to get up at 5:00am to throw medicine balls against a wall. Top athletes have clear goals and a kind of inner drive that seems able to move them through vast amounts of pain and difficulty. I’ve envied athletes for similar reasons, although they approach life very differently than cats do. It would be nice to have such a close alignment between one’s natural desires and one’s capabilities. They are completely satisfied to bask in a square of sunlight on the carpet, or squat on a dresser like a Zen chicken, blinking slowly and indifferently. Throughout my life, when faced with adversity, I’ve often wanted to magically become either a cat or an Olympic athlete.Ĭats are enviable because they’re immune to worry and striving, and feel no pressure to accomplish long-term projects. I am one of many Other People for her, just as she is for me. At least for my friend, I was the person who was not present most of the day, who at some point appeared at the door, smiled and sat down at the far side of the table, talked about what I’d been up to, ate some pizza, walked with her to the corner, said goodbye, and disappeared again into the distance. I had a surreal moment, while having dinner with one of my favorite Other People, in which I realized that at that moment, as I sat across a Formica table in a local pizza place, that I was the Other Person. Most of the time, no matter how large their role in your story, they’re simply offscreen - somewhere out there in the world, doing who knows what. You never get to see inside their heads, you don’t get to choose their behavior, and ultimately you know them only by what they do and what they say. They might spend quite a lot of time onscreen, but they always remain Other People. Most of them are bit players, but some of these Other People are major characters in your story. In life, there’s you - the omnipresent Protagonist - and then countless Other People. Seeing people come and go like this might crystalize one of the poignant realities of living a human life: you’re the only one who’s there from start to finish. While you’re fast-forwarding through it, looking for certain memorable moments, one thing you’d see frequently is a person you know entering the room you’re in, talking with you for a while, and then leaving for a much longer while. Imagine that when you die your life is converted into an extremely long, first-person YouTube video, which you may review at your leisure. (The final eight minutes of the show always consisted of Bob Saget drawing out the awarding of the weekly ten-thousand-dollar prize.) As with most highly gratifying things, supply was very limited. There was only that twenty-two minutes per week though. Laughing at them with my parents and sister made for some of the best quality family time I remember. To have all the best camcordered clips concentrated in one place was something truly special. Those perfect moments of comedic human accident were captured on video only rarely, because camcorders were still an expensive luxury item. A good video of someone dropping a birthday cake down the stairs, or tumbling headlong into a kiddie pool during a dizzy-bat race, was still a rare and hilarious sight. It’s hard to convey how precious this material was at the time. In the early 1990s, perhaps my favorite part of the week happened between 7:00 and 7:22 on Sundays, when America’s Funniest Home Videos broadcast their best submissions.
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