#oneaday Day 82: Mind. Blown.

It’s a really good thing that humans have the capacity to take things for granted. It’s not always the best thing to do, but occasionally, it’s quite fun to just step back (not literally, otherwise you’ll bump into that guy behind you and he’ll drop his fine china tea-set, making a horrible stain on the carpet and making him wonder whether or not he should ask you to pay for it because he’s actually quite anxious about talking to other people and doesn’t want to become acquainted with someone by yelling at them, but at the same time that tea-set was very expensive and belonged to his grandmother so he feels like he should at least say something so basically, don’t bump into him) and think about how awesome “things” are.

Take cars, for example, and by extension most means of motorised transportation. Most of us use some form of transport every single day and don’t give it a second thought. But think about it. You get into a car through a door, like a room. It has carpets and windows and furniture, like a room. But it moves. When you sit in a car, you’re in a room that moves. When you’re driving on the motorway, you’re sitting in a chair that’s going 90 70 miles per hour. That’s pretty amazing, right?

And the Internet. Particularly wireless Internet. Walk into pretty much any coffee shop and the Internet is in the air around you. You can’t see it, feel it, smell it, taste it, but turn on your iPhone (other smartphones and Wi-Fi compatible devices are available) and it’s there, allowing you to watch videos of cats at your convenience while you enjoy a half-caff skinny tall frappucino with extra coolwhip spoogebang sprinklywotsits and a slab of cake. Cat videos from thin air! Amazing.

Or the fact you’re reading this blog (which is amazing in itself) — I’m sitting here typing this in my makeshift study in Cambridgeshire while you could be sitting absolutely anywhere, even high in the sky on some airline services, reading this. Perhaps you’re in the future right now, scanning back through my past entries to get a better picture of who I am and whether I’m the sort of person who likes bludgeoning kittens to death (hint: I’m not… although that’s just the sort of thing someone who had a secret life bludgeoning kittens to death might say) — and you’re reading this. You’re in my brain, sucking up my soul. Stop it. But it’s still pretty amazing.

Of course, if you take all this to its natural conclusion, the fact that we’re here at all doing the things we do is pretty amazing, too. We are walking, talking lumps of chemical reactions that are reacting in such a way as to make us aware of our own existence and able to control our own destinies… or at least, so it seems, anyway. Chemical reactions who can write blog posts, talk to people who are 160 miles away, drink coffee and listen to music at the same time. Amazing.

I’ll stop now before my head explodes at the fact we’re on a big lump of rock hurtling through space that just happens to move in a nice elliptical orbit around a MASSIVE BURNING GLOB OF GAS and start taking everything for granted again.