5 Soak it up

A long, long, long time ago, tiny single-celled organisms appeared on Earth.

For example, an amoeba. Like this:

And then what happened? Well, 300 million years later those single-celled organisms evolved into multicelled organisms. Like this:

Then what happened? Well, 300 million years after that, those multicelled organisms evolved into plants and animals. Like us!

And you know what’s interesting about this?

Single-celled organisms never went away. They didn’t die off. They weren’t rendered obsolete. Plants, animals, and our own bodies have hundreds of millions of single-celled organisms living on us and inside us. Our body is their home.

What about multicelled organisms?

Well, importantly, they are built of single-celled organisms. And, also importantly, they didn’t die off but rather became part of newer, greater wholes. There are multicelled organisms in trees. In you. In me. In Oprah.

What’s my point?

What we often think of as evolution “destroying and replacing” the past is actually “transcending and including.”

The past gets soaked up to create the future.

The author Ken Wilber has put this idea forward in numerous books such as A Brief History of Everything. Cities didn’t wipe out farms but rather incorporated farming in a more efficient and productive way. Movies didn’t replace photography. Trip-hop didn’t replace hip-hop. We didn’t replace gorillas. Our evolved rational thinking didn’t replace emotions but rather sponged up those emotions into our newly evolved rational brains.

Real growth, real evolution, doesn’t come about through destruction. It comes from taking what came before and integrating it into a greater whole. What comes from burning libraries? Piles of ash. And what comes from reading the books and developing your own ideas? Pretty much all great thinking. What comes from razing towns? Piles of ash. And what comes from studying other countries’ technology and copying it and learning from it? China. No, just kidding. I mean all future technologies.

There’s no ride hailing without GPS.

There’s no Siri without search.

There’s no you of today without everything in your past. There’s no you of tomorrow without everything you’re going through now, either.

If my first wife hadn’t fallen out of love with me, I wouldn’t have moved to a bachelor apartment in The Hudson. I would never have met a girl down the hall named Rita. I would never have fallen in love with her friend Leslie. I would never have moved in with Leslie a year later and I would never have proposed to her a year after that.

I would never have gotten married to her.

And I would never have had a son with her named… Hudson.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I had soaked up the past, and it created my future.

And that didn’t just happen to me.

It happens to all of us.

It happens to you.

It happens to me.

It happens to us.

As you’re falling, you can add a dot-dot-dot to keep going, then shift the spotlight so you aren’t blaming yourself, and then finally, finally, finally try to

See it as a step.