Time Travel! Or, What I Learned From my Anthropology Degree!

For myself and anyone else who has ever contemplated time travel seriously there's a question that burns in the heart: not just where would you go, but when. If you had all of time at your grubby fingertips, if you could go anywhere and anywhen, what would the first stop be?  This is as vital a question to armchair dreamers as figuring out what to do with that 50 million dollar lottery we're all bound to win someday.

My answer isn't a specific date. It's a bunch of dates and events that no one could possibly know the exact specifications of, since they happened thousands, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of years before written language was even a twinkle in homo sapiens sapiens eyes...

I want to be there the first time a human ancestor picks up a shell, drills a hole in it, and threads a piece of animal tendon or stretched skin through that hole, tying it off and wearing it around their neck.

I want to be there the first time an animal skin is dyed, and the first time a hominid's living skin is similarly painted.

I want to be there the first time an ape realizes that meat + fire = BBQ.

I want to be there when someone adds the earliest incarnation of garlic to their cooking and gets their MIND BLOWN.

I want to be there when some ancient humanoid beats the first deliberate rhythm, with their hands on their flesh, or with a stick on a rock, mimicking the inexorable heartbeat they must hear sometimes when they lay their head against the chest of their mothers, and later, their lovers, or when they hear their own heart beating in their ears as they try to sleep. Is it the footsteps of giants? Or the pulsing of the earth that they're replicating with their drumming?

I want, more than anything, to stand in a cave, and watch the first brushstrokes of the first cave painting. Did that ancestor of mine feel what I feel when I stand in front of a blank canvas? The crush of excitement and fear and a desperate drive to add color and life and movement to a surface that has been without those things? How many times was that wall approached, instrument in hand while this magnificent being struggled with doubt or anticipation? What glowing, burning thing lit their way?

Was their first stroke done in a fit of pique? Quickly, madly, desperately moving because not moving is no longer an option? Or slowly, cautiously, tentatively, with some hint of inborn knowledge that these marks would mean so much to so many for so long?

Did the finished product bring tears to that hominids' eyes? Like it brings tears to mine?

These are the whens and wheres that I would travel to. Because every time I wear a necklace, I think of the graves of early homo sapiens, littered with shells in graduated sizes, each drilled painstakingly and obviously connected together with a fabric that has long since been reclaimed by the earth around it.

Every time I wear a pretty dress, or put make-up on my face, I think of the ancient evidence we've dug up of dyes from every imaginable (and occasionally disgusting) source on this earth, and all the places we used those dyes, and I think of the obvious attraction we have as a species to color.

Every time I stir a pot of something over a flame, I think of a time when fire was a brand new technology, scarcely understood and terrifying, but how it was nevertheless used to create food that meant more than mere survival.

Every time I listen to music, I think of the long line of ancestors whose bodies must, must have been moved to dancing, and I twirl with my arms in the air pretending I'm under an ancient sky at the dawn of man.

Every time I paint, I cry for the homo sapiens who first knew how to see beauty in the world and add to it through the work of their own hands.

I cannot help but get caught in the idea of the moment that these things first happened. What were these creatures before art? Before rhythm and painting and decoration and cuisine? How did they react the first time? Because there was a first time. Somewhen in time, there is a day, with a sunrise and a sunset. The day before this day, there was no such thing as a drum. The day after, there was music!

And the reaction of the others in whatever homo species this occurred in must have been positive enough, or we wouldn't have music today.  Or art, fashion, cuisine. The evidence of the value of these things exists in their longevity, from the dawn of man to today. These are, in fact, the markers by which anthropologists date that dawning.

And whenever I consciously participate in these things, I feel strings connecting me to those ancestors, pulling me backwards in time, but also forwards, since those strings also connect me to every human being that exists today, and that will exist in the future.

A Hike to Remember

For the last three years, my birthday has fallen during the Spring Tour of my choir: the University of Alberta Mixed Chorus. Now, I didn't work up the courage to join this organization until I was already halfway through my Anthro degree, and I didn't go on tour until my second year. Adding in the four year gap between my first and second year of university, I've ended up being one of the older members of this group. Many of them are now a decade younger than me.

This doesn't really bother me, and I don't feel out of place there. Lord knows I've got the sense of humor of a thirteen year old boy, and I don't think anyone could accuse me of being a buzzkill or anything like that.

I've never been huge on yearly evaluations; I don't make New Year's resolutions and I'm probably the type of person who would forget her own anniversary, so my birthday is just a day when I can milk being the center of attention for all it's worth. I've never really used it as a marker of 'how far I've come since last year' and I didn't spend the 3rd of May in deep reflection on the ups and downs of being 27, or the fears of being 28.

But this last year has been a transformative year for me, and on tour, the day before my birthday, something magically delicious happened that highlighted the actual distance between 27 year old Brenna, and 28 year old Brenna, and I'd like to tell that story, if you'll indulge me.

A year ago I was sitting on my balcony, smugly happy with the events that had led to my being there. But I realized that there were other things I wanted that I did not have, and I started thinking about what those things were and what I could do to achieve them. And what I realized I wanted, more than anything else, was to be healthier. "Well," I thought, "That's new." I have wanted many things in my life: I have wanted to be skinnier; I have wanted to be more outgoing; I have wanted to be in a loving relationship, but I've never given much thought to my health. Until that moment. 

I started with things that felt little and therefore achievable. I wanted to be able to look in my fridge and feel proud that none of the ingredients on any of the labels included words I did not recognize as food. I started buying more whole foods and baking my own bread.

I wanted to cut refined sugar down to almost nothing and replace it with fruit to assuage my sweet tooth. You have to understand, I got through university without ever drinking a cup of coffee, no energy drinks, no pop, no caffeinated beverages of any kind. My drug of choice to keep myself awake during all nighters was Fuzzy Peaches. So I started going to the Strathcona Farmer's Market every Saturday and bringing home mounds of..well, actual peaches...and slowly, my diet underwent a revolution for the better.

I chose to eat one cupcake a week at work instead of one a day. It is unbelievably difficult to cut refined sugar out when you work in a cupcake shop, decorating cakes, working with icing ALL. DAY. LONG. But I managed it. I developed a mantra in my head that I repeated every time a scrap of cake was in my hand and headed to my mouth, "Brenna, your body is not a garbage can." And eventually, I stopped craving sugar every moment of every day.

I started seriously using the treadmill my mother had given me when it stopped being of use to her. I stopped thinking of exercise as a punishment for the way I was eating and started instead to think of it as a way to achieve a very specific goal: to be able to go hiking with friends.

When I lived in New Zealand, I went on two three-day treks with a couple who were in far better shape than I was. I huffed and puffed and perspired my way up the Humpridge and Kepler ridges and suffered lung and muscle agony. Those six days are still the most painful and embarrassing that I have ever endured. Yet they remain some of the most beautiful memories of my entire life.
 

Hiking the Kepler Trek, 2nd day. This is my all-time favorite of all my photographs.

When I hear about friends of mine going on hikes, I feel a desperate jealousy, since I would love to go with them, but hate being the one constantly lagging behind, hurt radiating from every pore as I struggle to keep up and fail miserably. Those hikes happened in 2005, and I have not had the courage to do any hiking since.

Gradually, the changes I had made in my lifestyle began to be reflected in my clothes. I've lost 40 pounds, 4-5 dress sizes, Lord knows how many inches, and it all seems a bit surreal, since the weight loss and size decrease weren't really my ultimate goal.

But the point of the story is this: On May 2nd, the day before my 28th birthday, the UAMC was taken on a short hike along The Golden Mile Trail outside the Tinhorn Creek Vineyards in Oliver, BC. What we all thought would be a leisurely walk through a vineyard turned out to be a brisk hike on an all uphill trail leading to a bunch of old abandoned mines and spectacular views of the Okanagan Valley.  There were definitely a few unhappy people in the group, some of my friends among them, who wished they'd known what kind of "walk" this would really be.

I was thrilled. I felt energized. My whole body felt like it was saying, "Yes, Brenna. You can do this now. You can walk up a ridge without feeling like you might actually keel over at any minute. Your legs and your lungs can take you all the places you want to go. They can do that now." On the way back, at the end of the hike, I was at the head of the pack, jogging down the hill just because I could.

I cannot express the depths of my joy. I am not happier because I am skinnier, or more fit. I am happier because I finally understood that happiness doesn't come like a winning lottery ticket, only to a small and random few, and meted out by absolute dumb luck. It comes through every little teeny tiny choice that I make, day after day. And if I just keep making the choice to move towards the things that bring me joy and contentment and fulfillment and peace, I can literally come out on top.

This is not a story that has an end. I am not finished working on my happiness; I will have to keep making these choices for the rest of my life, through good times and bad.

It took me 28 years to understand who I am and how to make myself happy. I know there are people who come to this knowledge much younger, and I know there are people who will die of old age not knowing, but this is my story, not theirs, and this is the path that I happened to take, and damn, but I am happy with it.