The Call of The Wild

Suddenly a fixation with my own status as a domesticated human has gripped me.  I've understood, for years, that humans are wild animals that self-domesticated around the time of agriculture, while we were domesticating everything else we could get our hands on.  But that's been a cerebral understanding. This week,  the knowledge has hit me in the gut.

For this moment, domestication is feeling a bit like a leash or a fenced enclosure.  The more I read about prehistory, the more evidence I stumble upon that wild humans were peace-loving, cooperative, friendly, relaxed, and well-fed, the safer it feels to hear and respond to an inner call of the wild.

The call I hear has nothing to do with flying to a remote destination and joining a primitive tribe. It doesn't really even have to do with never doing laundry or changing another diaper again. No, my psyche whispers to start that business my partner and I have been dreaming of and cautiously planning for, even though it's a giant risk. To write what I want and say what I need to say, even if others may judge me for it. To dance to the beat of my own drum, to color outside the lines of society's strictures. 

It calls me to trust in my own instincts, to believe in my own value as a friend, mother, lover, partner, daughter, sister, writer, leader, even when I'm not self-censoring. That's a key difference between the wild and the domesticated: a wild animal trusts her instincts implicitly,  a domesticated animal has been trained to curb her instincts in exchange for a reward someone else selected. No wonder there's been such a thorough and enthusiastic campaign over millennia to paint the life of wild humans as violent, impoverished and miserable. If we believe our natural instincts are terribly flawed, we can judge our every desire to push societal norms as "base" and our self-control as "civilized." I'll probably never be ready to give up the comforts of domestic life (airplanes and heaters come to mind immediately as things-I-don't-ever-want-to-live-without) but I'm not above trying to have my cake and eat it too. So here's to honoring wild instincts within a domesticated environment... I'll let you know how it goes.