First I'd like to say that I'm deeply indebted to Rocket for introducing me years ago to this amazingly wonderful writer named Bill Bryson. I just love his incisive wit and quirky look on life. Seriously, this guy can describe even the most mundane thing in the world in the most liveliest term and make it into a big rolling ball of excitement. Here's an excerpt from one of his best-sellers, "A Short History of Nearly Everything," which I'm more than half-way through. It's a 500-page of rollicking-fun facts about the Earth and the universe. If one ever need a science primer, then this is the book. Of course, there are those voluminous tomes about "Life" by Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins or other evolutionary biologists but they're typically very dense. By the way, the excerpt is about the merit of being unambitious from the evolutionary point-of-view. Considering that we are now living in a hyper-competitive world, toiling in the rat-race day in and day out, this is an especially pertinent message for us humans.
"Like most things that thrive in harsh environments, lichens are slow-growing. It may take a lichen more than half a century to attain the dimensions of a shirt button... It would be hard to imagine a less fulfilling existence... It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of all the intoxicating existence we've been endowed with. But what's life to a lichen? Yet, it's impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours - arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on. Lichens don't. Like virtually all living things, they will suffer any hardship, endure any insult, for a moment's additional existence. Life, in short, just wants to be. But - here's an interesting point - for the most part it doesn't want to be much.
... [Speaking of the frequent global-scale catastrophes that were the brutal facts of life for the young Earth eons ago] Fortunately, that moment hasn't happened [for our infant-like human existence - in geological time, our collective human existence is like a baby barely out of the mother's womb since the Earth is estimated to be 4.5 billion years old], but the chances are good that it will. I don't wish to interject a note of gloom just at this point, but the fact is that there is one other extremely pertinent quality about life on Earth: it goes extinct. Quite regularly. For all the trouble they take to assemble and preserve themselves, species crumple and die remarkably routinely. And the more complex they get, the more quickly they appear to go extinct. Which is perhaps one reason why so much of life isn't terribly ambitious."
See, there's a good reason on not being productive and to lead a gloriously unambitious life. So next time if people mention how slothful you are and how your existence on this god's green acre is merely a waste of a good space, tell them that you are simply preparing for the doomsday event when a 50-mile wide meteor hit the Earth and that you'll be one of the few remaining survivors. Nothing beats the vindicated feeling of being able to utter the post-apocalyptic words of "I told you so!" - even though there will be hardly anybody around to tell it to.
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