An Accidental Evolution

You ever have one of those sudden realizations when you wake up and just say out loud to yourself "How the deuce did I get here?!"

Not here in the literal sense, because I am pretty sure if you woke up in some forsaken place of the unknown you'd be a bit worse off than you generally are, but I mean in the sense that you wake up and you are in a state in your head that you have no idea how you got to.

Like the train in your brain just showed up at some arbitrary station and you were forced to get off and take a look around, baffled and confused as though you just woke up from a drunken stupor, and wonder where the hell you are and what the crap happened to the stations you swore were next in line on the track you were pretty convinced you were headed on.

And so it goes, as Stewie's voice chimes "What the deuce" inside your head and you take a look around this brand new mystical brain space. These feelings you never expected, or emotions you didn't know you had left. You're subliminal Darwinian mental evolution as it were.

It was ever so subtle in the making. Just get up, go to work, live life. You suffer losses and bad luck day after day, so little things just seemed to go unnoticed. You learned to tune out the positives, any positives, because let's face it you always waited for that elusive other shoe to drop. You knew in your head it was coming, didn't you? Hadn't it come so many times that your collection rivaled that of Imelda Marcos?

But in all that waiting, all that desperate anticipation for what could go wrong, they instead went....right? How could that be? As though they seemingly canceled themselves out and just ceased to happen. As though you were so distracted by the outward and obvious that it had all gone on under the radar.

So aloof and in denial you try to thwart it all back to the way it once was. Change? You and change are surely not friends. Never have been really. It had never been for the better before, why now would it prove different? And yet, yet this irksome feeling in your chest that rises or in the pit of your stomach, where were they coming from? These stirrings were new, they were complicated.

Things you didn't want to feel really. Right? Or maybe, maybe somewhere buried deep in my psyche I did. Maybe there was a battle, like Knights on horseback with lances charging each other, one Sir Cynical and one Sir Optimist. My inner selves out to get each other. And may the best man (well woman really) win?

But then it happened. Evolution. Accidental and strange. Awkward and clumsy and definitely not as smooth as you have would imagined. But you never imagined it. It just sort of happened, like humans from apes. Time just morphed itself forward and suddenly it seems you are here, now and different.

And now all that was and has been familiar and the same for so long is suddenly no longer the same. It's full of emotion and of feelings it wasn't full of before. There are thoughts that weren't filling your head before. Those twinges your body gets that never reacted as such before. And you don't know why, or how, or when really. And you're confused by it all, and it's complicated, and you almost wish that it was back the way it was, but it's not and it's better, but you're scared.

Vulnerability to fear is an amazing power. It is consuming and toxic and exhausting. But your mind wanders anyway. Through fields of mindless possibilities. Not of the what-ifs that go wrong, but the what-ifs that go right. And you start to not recognize yourself. That callous cynic who looked back at you day after day in the mirror, with a heart like the Grinch 3 sizes too small, much like the Grinch is changing.

An accidental evolution. And…hope?