adaptation

I was reading MJ’s blog a while back—black background with white text. When I looked away from the screen, I could still see the image of it superimposed on my office wall.

A few weekend ago, I did some tree trimming with my son—hot work on a hot afternoon. When I first went out I noticed it was hot and muggy, but we just kept working. I finally realized I was getting dehydrated, so I went back inside for a while. Man was it cold! And dry. I wondered why on earth we would pay so much to keep the air running like that.

The other night I made grilled salsa and pickled jalapeños with my son. We were crying from the onions and sneezing from the jalapeños, but we just kept at it. It wasn’t too bad. I had to run to the store to get some canning jars. Everything was off the fire and cooling, so I just left it where it was. When I got back I walked in to this thick, overwhelming wave of odors, and I hoped everyone wasn’t too mad at me for stinking up the house.

I use this bible software program on my computer. One night I was scanning through it, looking for something. My mind started wandering, and before I realized, I was just scrolling and scrolling and scrolling back through scriptures and high speed. I finally broke out of my daze and let up on the mouse. But the screen kept moving. Only, it was now drifting back the opposite direction. And I was having a hard time catching up to it.

I read an intro to a story once where the script was leaning back, as if it were written by a person who was backhanded. It was kind of an interesting and archaic looking font. And then I got to chapter one. Regular font. I could hardly read it. It looked so strange, like it was going to fall off the page.

And then there are the noise-cancelling headphones my family gave me for birthday or Christmas or father’s day or something. Awesome. I let the flight attendant try them on the airplane. I thought she was going to freak out. The way they work is they have these built in microphones pointing out that listen for repeating patterns of noise, and then they produce a negative sound wave to cancel the external noise. So it’s actually louder inside the headphones than when it started (there’s no way to create anti-sound), but my ear adds the one sound to the other and gets something that’s flat but at a higher level, and so it gets interpreted as silence, but louder silence.

I also have on my car stereo this thing called Speed Controlled Volume (SCV). If I use this, it automatically adjusts the sound up when I’m going faster, and down when I slow down. This seemed strange to me at first, but I’m sure everybody’s experienced this thing where you’re listening to music going down the highway, and then you come to a stop sign, and it hurts your ears. You wonder what in the world you were thinking to make the music that loud. But it really wasn’t that loud. Your ears had adjusted up for all the engine and road noise so that the music wasn’t that much louder than “normal”, than “baseline”, than “rest”, than “peace”.

The human body is adaptable. Evolution theorists have told us for decades now that adaptation is the key to survival and even progress. They are quite pleased with themselves for figuring this out. And there may be some truth in it. But the most amazing thing to me about adaptation of our species is how quick we are to do it. Even in these simple things I’ve just written out. It’s amazing how quickly and how decidedly we adjust to what we are presented with, and are able to accept it as normal.

It makes me wonder how much our heart adjusts to and calls it normal. And how long the soul can survive in chaos and unholiness and call it peace and blessedness. It’s not that we’re wrong to accept things, to accept a life of sin, to accept a desert of lack. It’s not that we are rebellious if we are accepting something less than “God’s best” for us. It’s just that we have the amazing ability to adjust down or up to the version of reality that is being presented to us at the moment. It's part of our design. It's also why we need friends, why we were created to live in fellowship. We need people to say, “What’s up with that?” and “Is this what you really want?” and “Why is it you think this is the only response for that?” and “What would it take for you to wash your hands of this whole mess?" and even, “How long do you intend to keep living this way?”