why ducks have cool life
I absolutely love the sight of ducks floating calmly on water. To me, they are archetype of meditators or even contemplators. They seem fulfilled and realized beings. They “know” exactly what is it to be a duck, there is no asking what’s my duck purpose, why I have to clean my feathers a fifth time today or float on the same pond day after day. And when they get into a duck-fight, a few moments later they just flap their wings, shake their bump, and then look like nothing has happened.
What happened in a proverbial Garden of Eden is that ducks became aware that they are ducks. Or to be more precise, ducks became aware they are humans. No, wait, it was humans becoming aware they are humans.
On top of this self-awareness, we also realized a bunch of other things. We got to know about life and death, noticed that others can have more of something than ourselves, started regretting stuff belonging in the past etc. In order words, human’s mind was born and with it, all the torments of a conscious being.
Paradoxically, ducks are fully realized, peaceful, and in harmony precisely because they know nothing about those things, including being aware that they are ducks.
The spin-off from the evolution called (self) awareness is an unimaginable and surprising gift. We can begin to understand and consequently appreciate this magical display of wonder and love that we all are, and that we all live in. All this because the blind evolutionary forces, running for billions of years, in the last fraction of its development “took a gamble”, and allowed emergence of a game-changing feature of awareness.
I’m not exactly convinced whether this has paid off so far in the grand scheme of things. But then again, looking at a life-timeline, it seems like this self-awareness experimentation is still in its infancy. This would explain why we are so messed up and existentially lost as a species. If we are lucky though (no asteroids, major volcano eruptions, man-made ecosystem fuck-up etc., or we manage to hop on to another planet in the meantime) we could perhaps become realized beings again in a few hundred thousand of years or so. But let’s first wait just another few dozens to see if the artificial intelligence - that we are so eagerly creating - doesn’t take over the reins in a way that we couldn’t even phantom with our limited minds. Who knows, maybe the AI will take pity on us and turn us all into ducks?
