In my attempt to be as gender-neutral as possible with the toys my kids play with, I failed miserably.
My 2 year old boy has lots of cars and dinosaurs.
My 4 year old girl has lots of dolls, cats, and unicorns.
I truly did not buy those toys in the beginning. I tried to unbiasedly follow their internal desire for toys. But in each toy shop, my boy is magically attracted to rough toys that often look very intimidating. His reaction to them are loud “ARGHS” as he copies their mimics and sounds. While my daughter goes to the doll section with cute little kittens reacting with soft response of “aaah, look how cuuuuute mommy”.
Back to dinosaurs.
Every evening, for the past weeks, my boy falls asleep while I am reading him about dinosaurs. The book begins with stating that the earth and life on earth started about 4 billion years ago.
4 billion.
That number strikes me every single time.
1 million years ago is already quite a lot, in my opinion. Now we talk 1000 times 1 million, and that, 4 times.
I am trying my best to imagine that period. I just cannot grasp it. Maybe it is simply a miscalculation? My ego wants to believe that all life started with humans. Before us, awesome, smart humans, there was simply…..Nothing…
We are the beginning and the end.
We can not be some life form that evolved over time from other, less awesome life forms like us. We are too great, too awesome to be simply the result of evolution. It would make us way too interconnected to the rest of this (earthy, unhygienic) planet.
However, as soon as I simply accept that there might be truth in that number, I begin to feel humbled.
How long will our life form make it? Or will in a billion years from now our entire existence be excavated and analyzed by other life forms that made it further?
“Mummy!” my boy screams for the second time. “What animal is that?! Mommy?!”
Oh, yeah I forgot.
I was supposed to read.