On this Thanksgiving holiday, let’s remember to be grateful for the strength of our ancestors. All of our genes were passed on to us because they helped our ancestors survive many hardships and challenges. It’s easy to lose sight of this since daily survival is no longer a challenge. Certain genes that may have helped us adapt to difficult conditions may be misfiring in the face of new diets, new environments, and new lifestyles. Perhaps now they make us susceptible to certain diseases, cause us to store more body fat than we would like, or slow us down for certain new goals that we focus on today.
Hence, parts of us are no longer wanted and no longer needed and we fail to appreciate how they may have served a critical role in allowing us to be here in the first place. Let’s try to stop and think about how these parts of us may have protected our ancestors from some threat to survival and let’s think about how many people had to die because they lacked a certain adaptation that we now struggle to deal with.
As a culture, we appear to suffer a great deal of torment from aspiring to be or training to be people we are not. Our energies can better be focused on optimizing ourselves and our unique capabilities. Our culture narrowly promotes a certain body image as the model of “fitness.” Athletic energy is often channeled into a few narrowly defined dimensions. These pressures ignore that we are a population of people originating from thousands of different tribes that faced very different ancestral challenges. Different body types and different strengths exist for a reason. All strengths come paired with certain weaknesses. The deeper we explore our history the better we can understand why we are each built the way we are and what our own deepest strengths are.
Humans always have been and always will be working extremely hard to adapt and optimize themselves to changing environments. The only strategy that really makes sense to me is to just keep doing that, full of gratitude for those who came before us. Here’s a meditation to consider as we work out this week:
Hello my ancestors. I thank you for this body and the opportunity to walk this Earth. The further I go, the more I realize how much this body is capable of and I wonder about all that you had to endure to pass this on to me. You have done your part as I will do mine. I will not waste this moment.
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