On the Commonality of Human Ants

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When I travel by plane, I love to peer out the window. Two of my cousins are commercial pilots, as was their dad. One of them occasionally shares his photos from the cockpit. It’s beautiful from his vantage point — the sun setting atop the clouds, or clouds bunched nearby like puffy friends, the sun shining like mania off the ocean. What an office view.

At the end of last year, I took a trip by plane, allowing me to watch the world from above for a little while. The flight home is still with me, the urban light patterning in the blackness sitting like a curious ghost in my mind’s eye. Lifting off the ground and scanning the city sprawl from above, you could see the patterns of human endeavor below.

It was a fascinating web of scraggy light threads, and it had a distinct pattern. There were concentrations of light, very much like neural networks, interconnected by sinewy lines, which were highways. The whole landscape resembled a large-scale brain.

Intentional, Repetitive, Neural

Maybe cities and suburbs are like brains. Usually, a settlement is initiated with intention based on resources or geography or safety advantage. From here, maybe the patterns of growth follow similar neural initiatives — purposefully at first, and then via repetitive, habitual use.

From high up you get a sense of the predictability of humanity. Each city resembles the next in density. Every rural area follows a pattern — sparely lit up spots on the terrain connected by tiny lines of light, which is a smaller highway, unlike the major thoroughfares that carve through urban centers. Most folks bunch up together in one spot, while a lesser number span out into the surrounding country.

It’s an intertwining, this way we mark up the night with our presence. If I am a giant looking down, I see scads of ants inhabiting a vast space in repetitious ways. We are a bunch of ants in the scheme of things. Giants would lump us together the way we lump ants together. An ant is an ant. A human is a human.

Yet, if this is so, why do we continue to think we’re so different from each other? It’s the easiest thing to think, and the hardest to shake free of. But I get it.

Sly tricks

The messaging from each of us can be so varied in tone and inflection. One person has words that trickle out like a subtle breeze while another has bomb-cyclone speech. Some eyes dart around while others seer into souls. Faces move in countless ways. Accents are sly things. They tell us that the speaker with an accent can’t quite see the world the way we do. The sly little accent, of course, is having the other speaker think the same thing.

This is to say nothing of speaking in different languages. In that case, fuhgettaboudit.

But for all our variety of presentation and situation, our experiences traversing time in a human physique are so similar.

For example, hands

All hands grip, touch, and pry. The hands of the world make soft caresses for loving reassurance, and hard grips for surety. Claps, prayer, waves, a feel in the dark to ascertain, frenetic motions of battle — these are things hands do universally. Hands everywhere know about the careful handling of a new baby. They put food in the mouth and shield the eyes from the sun.

Our hands are one of our shining human glories, and whether you go through life speaking one language or another, whether you’re generally cranky or upbeat, whether you are rich or have no food — all hands universally display that we wish to feel our way through life the best we can.

And shoulders

This set of bones appears in all of us so our bodies can hang off it. With the muscles of the front and back, we prop the shoulders up to stand proud. We reverse the tension to crouch in fear. This armature tightens in all of us to choreograph worry, shame, fear, and anger. Then it releases the body’s primitive clench to receive a caring touch.

These bones square themselves to the world, and they shake with fabulous laughter. If you look intently at them, you will see the shoulders are a universal indication of our wish to optimally adapt to the will of time and circumstance.

What about feet?

Feet range from pedicured to broken, but they carry embodied hope for the miniscule bit of time we call a lifespan. What I find far more interesting than the difference in feet is their similarity in how they’re expert at some motions and stumblers at others. They, like hands, can be a record of how a life was lived, and that record had the same formula to guide it — luck + genes + environment.

We sound and act differently, but we all have dreams for ourselves, which you can view from an airplane at night. You can see how we collectively carved out a life here on earth, branching out from a city and circling back to it. The markings of the cities appear booming and complicated. The lines of the rural areas appear hushed and delicate.

Remember, there are a bunch of ants who live down there. Their anthills vary in size and form, the voices emitted sound different. They are varying shades. Some are big, some small.

Mostly, they’re the exact same.