I was watching a TED video last week about a paleantologist...
(likely spelled incorrectly - but someone who studies dinasours...)
And, I got to thinking...
The earth's been around for about 5 BILLION years, right!
It took almost 4 billion years to simply get to photosynthesis and multiple cell organism reproduction.
The dinasours didn't appear until just 225 million years ago and lived until about 65 million years ago. They lived for 160 MILLION years!
"Modern" man evolved from about 5 million years ago, and didn't really start "looking" like us till the homo erectus 500,000 years ago.
Homo sapiens started 250,000 years ago, and the neandrathal man 70,000 years ago.
The current version of the homosapien really started about 35,000 years ago...
All the while, dinasour and man and all species fighting every day for their existence from predators, from illness, from weather... living in discomfort, uncertainty...
Civilization as we know it started around 5000 BC in the Mesopotamia... 7,000 years ago. Before then, man was hunters and gatherers. Then spread to Egypt.
Man's life expectancy was between 20 and 30 years old.
We were hunters and gatherers.
Then the Greek Empire and the Roman Empire lasted for a few hundred years around the time of Christ.
And, we come to modern times.
Man's life expectancy was between 20 and 30 for most of man's existence.
It didn't start going up until about 1600 - 1700, and it went up slowly.
It was still in the 40's in the 1930's.
It has grown by more than 100% on a world wide average in the last 200 or so years, and most of that has come in the last 75 years.
When you think about the world we live in...
When you think about the time we live in...
When you think about the COMFORT we live in...
When you think about the PEACE we live in...
We are SO, SO, SO very lucky...
If the history of earth was 24 hours long...
the Dinasours were around for 38 minutes...
Man-kind as we know it has been around for less than 3 seconds!
Civilization since mesopotamia has lasted less than one tenth of a second!
In the last 50 years, 20 years... our ability to learn... to know has amplified so vastly...
If the history of the world was a WHOLE week - the odds of living in our century are ONE TENTH OF ONE SECOND...
We get to live, or the vast majority of us do...
Not having to fear being eaten by wild animals, being killed by our enemies, starving from a cold winter, living outside in the elements...
We have access to EVERYTHING...
The ULTIMATE comfort...
AND, WE WANT MORE!
Perhaps, that is at the heart of what drives us as human beings.... the desire for more, the desire for better...
Perhaps that is the chemistry that has allowed us to make the progress that we have made in the past thousand years, and exponentially so in the last century.
Perhaps that is what makes us so extremely different from every other mammal...
But, how much more could we possibly have?
How much more peace?
How much more comfort?
How much more wealth?
At what point does our desire for MORE shift to MORE GRATITUDE?
The odds of living in this time are likely similar to the odds of winning the powerball lottery!
Imagine... living in this time... each and every one of us HAVE ALREADY WON THE LOTTERY...
How much more do YOU want?
How much more comfort?
How much more gratitude?
How much more harmony?
We are human beings...
And, we've already won!
The question simply is...
what are you going to do with all of your winnings?
Nestor