Did you ever have one of those "lost" nightmares in which you find yourself having no idea where you are? You're wandering through an unfamiliar landscape, with no memory of how you got there. You may be trying to find something - your car, your home, a loved one - but nothing is familiar and you have no way to learn where you are or where to go. It's a terrifying and helpless feeling.
It might happen when you're awake. You wake up in a strange room and for a moment you don't know where you are. It's dizzying, disorienting. When you remember you're in a hotel or guest room and the mystery is explained, it comes as a huge relief. We have a very deep-rooted need to know where we are and how we got there - without it we are literally lost.
For most of the major passages of our lives - going to school, our relationships, our careers - we remember how it started, the decisions we made, the events that occurred. Everyday activities - cooking a meal, going to the bathroom - have an inception, an idea, a decision, a series of activities, and a conclusion. How could it be otherwise?
How strange then that our experience of life is just like those nightmares. We don't remember being born, or meeting the members of our family, or our first meal or our first sleep. We find ourselves in the midst of activities we don't remember starting. We just gradually came awake already alive, interacting with our environment, playing a game at the same time we're learning the rules. It's not that we "hit the ground running" - we were running before we can remember. We have some memories of early childhood - a few disjointed images like snapshots in an album - but our personal origins rely entirely on hearsay: our parents or older siblings tell us there was a time when we didn't exist and then we were born. But we have no memories of those events. We're also told that at some point we're going to die - everyone and everything - and nothing can be done to avert it. Mostly we just try not to think about that.
Similarly, we humans as a species have no memories of our origins. Today we have books and electronic records of the past; before that were epic poems and oral histories; and before that, superstition and creation myths. Just as we each know, intellectually, that we were once infants, we know that once we were not yet human. We find ourselves in the midst of a society we did not create, following the arc of a history we did not plan, playing our part, great or small, in the history of humanity. To what end?
And no one seems to think it odd that we should all find ourselves in this position, like waking up to find ourselves running in the middle of a race, passing people, others passing us, runners dropping out, others appearing. No one knows where or when the race started, how long it is, or where it ends. Is there a prize, a goal to be achieved? Are there rules no one told us? Are we close to the front of the pack, or nearing the back? And why are we all running?
Is this another one of those "lost" nightmares?
