The Polish.

My son and I talk about dinosaurs, a lot. Like many 5-year olds, he is both a little obsessed and impressively knowledgeable.

He studies the difference between a plesiosaur and a pterosaur, or the specific dietary requirements of a Spinosaurus, with the same diligence that I might study my inbox priorities.

What blows my mind about dinosaurs, is not the fact that a massive lizard might have lived where there is now our garden. It is not that fragility of life, and that an apocalyptic-sized asteroid could any year make an appearance from the heavens, and make everything irrelevant (including the heavens).

It is not even that a plesiosaur and a pterosaur are not even dinosaurs. Are you Googling that one? I did that too.

What blows my mind, is the boggling infinite feeling I get from the passage of time.

The fact that between the last dinosaurs and humans, that there was a 66 million year gap. And before that, there was something like 160 million years of dinosaurs, and other creatures that have mostly long since disappeared.

The scale of that, is a bit like staring into the night sky and trying to imagine space. It just makes you feel a bit queasy after a while.

It means for example that it is feasible one day to turn on the ‘radio’ to hear that it is the 10-millionth anniversary of Jailhouse Rock, or I am Here, or my Heart Will Go On, or Subterranean Homesick Blues.

I say ‘radio’, as who know what this will mean in 10-million years. It could be turning on an antenna in our brains via a switch our big toes, and listening to the latest podcast from Mars. Who knows really. Maybe we won’t even have big toes.

It is not even that this makes me feel small or unimportant. Because no-one, and nothing, should be small and unimportant if we are trying to build a purposeful human legacy that could last for 10-million years or more.

It is more that I sometimes wonder if we are trying to build that legacy.

If we were, then I feel we would be more interested. More interested in what it might take, together, to survive for 10-million years.

More interested in how we might all contribute to that legacy, because it feels like it might need us to give more than we take. More interested in how what we can do now, might help those who we will never meet, in fifteen generations time.

More interested in each other.

But to be interested, we have to be prepared to see what happens below the surface. And we are not.

We have become instead more interested in the polish. That thin layer of sheen. That one thing that catches the light, and distracts us from what is really going on. That one thing we reflect back at each other, to blind us from our own realities.

The one that helps us distract us from feeling complicated, and imperfect.

But the thing is, we are all complicated and imperfect. When we take away the polish, there is no such thing as a perfect individual, a perfect family, a perfect relationship, a perfect life. And that is the thing that is perfect.

We are all mixed up paint pots of emotion, and so why focus on the polish? Why focus on the thinnest layer, and the easiest to scratch away.

Instead, should we wonder what is happening below the surface of those we love, those we know, those with whom we have a fleeting interaction? Understanding why they might be imperfect, makes us more interested in life itself, and might be the key to unlock our legacy.

Understanding means we see beyond a label that we might apply, beyond the toxic inventions of our place in the world in relation to others, and beyond how we might use these things to get ahead.

Understanding means we can remove the need for others to struggle against constructions of our own making, and create more of a world where different is normal. A world where we don’t need to change, we just need to help each other remove the polish and see us for what we are. A human race. A natural being amongst other natural beings, in a passage of time that is infinite.

So next time we think about asking someone how they are, perhaps we should ask them about how they are different today. And if we can help with that. Because the thing is that sometimes feeling different can be good, and sometimes it can be bad.

But isn’t that just polish too? Maybe different, just, is.

And finally.

Back to dinosaurs. The other thing is that all those millions of years ago, we were all one country. One land mass. One island in the middle of the sea.

A country border is another thin line, another piece of polish that is designed to create differences based on things we can only see on the surface.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to look beyond those as well?

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