We are human beings. We function from a place of fear or attachment.

Fear—

“Next week, my husband is going back to work and I will be alone for the first time with the baby. I’m scared” says the Assistant Director of a premier onsite childcare center for a world-renowned cancer research institute.

She is intelligent, capable and has a smartphone. And she is terrified to be alone with her 4-week-old baby in a middle-class suburban neighborhood.

Attachment—

“Something different happens when you spend continuous time with someone.”

Different from the fragmented, intentional slices of time in preplanned meetings and scheduled socialization.

“When you travel with someone and live together a morning, mid-day and night you know them. They become your people, your community” says a senior level development executive for a global NGO who travels 50% and meditates each night he is home with his non-traveling wife.

***

Our feet swing like the random tick-tock of an unnumbered clock. Sitting atop the vacant lifeguard stand thinking about the positive ions flooding our cells from the stormy mid-morning waves.

As colleagues and friends who last traveled together 17 years ago; to Wichita Kansas on an internet startup blitz PR trip. Almost two decades later we still know each other. The quiet knowing of community and the direct result of this base code engineering.

We inhabit mitochondrial level responses stitched together from our times swinging in trees and stepping through the desert. Humans are evolutionary nomads. Our fear of being left with a newborn. Our deep attachment to community that has traveled us into safety.

These base codes define us. Still. They are surprising in today’s cultural alphabet. They reside subconsciously in the cellular memory. And they are beautifully universal to all people. This we need in our world today.

Mitochondrial messages from the past reminding us that we are critically important to each other.

Messages from undeniably long ago. We are already woke to being in community.