MIRROR
11.12.20
MILLER: Evolution is impartial. It doesn’t care what adaptation you employ, be it song or slime, speed or stillness that helps you endure. As for the hydra, the best guess scientists have these days as to how it cheats death, as Rob Steele explains, isn’t just its crazy stem cell production but its highly unusual ability to let go.
IThe Reluctant Immortalist – Invisibilia
STEELE: Whereas we aren’t so good at getting rid of cells. You know, our brain cells are pretty much with us for life, so if we get a brain tumor, we can’t get lucky and have it sort of ooze out our ear and disappear. It’s there, and eventually, the brain’s going to have to deal with the consequences.
MILLER: So maybe Daniel, for all his professed disinterest in the hydra’s immortality, is the one who had known, who had been practicing its secret all along. Time and time again, when I would ask him about hard memories – exes or break-ups or deaths – he would say…
“I don’t remember the details.”
I assumed that he was dodging. But maybe he wasn’t. Maybe, like the hydra, he, too, is constantly shedding the things that could hurt him in the name of staying youthful and free from pain.
He is 61 years old, and I cannot keep up with him on the mountain.
So, what does that mean for you, little fox?
You put down names and faces back to the dirt they came from. Pluck them from your memory with all its nutrient dense emotion and history so they may grow deep outside your body , and grow they will.
You who prides themselves on effort and ease, push and pull, catch and release. What are you holding on to?
Ideas formed in years of momentum, childish thought patterns that bear no children. Compromise was never an option for someone determined to live radically.
How do you compromise that?