I don't recall anything before that day. Amnesia at it's finest. It's the same day we all experience, our birthday. The day we put it all together. The day we begin to realize the part we play.
Before then it's all disconnected parts, trying to clinch a hand, strange appendages we're somehow related to. Then one day it falls into place. We look in the mirror and see ourselves. For the first time in our short lives we spot ourselves in the crowd, we see ourselves from outside ourselves. Our consciousness comes into being and some of it begins to make sense.
You can't describe what it was like before that day. It's pure instinct, reaction and action, stimlus and response. I wonder if we're somehow conscious of the early lessons at the time we learn them. When we struggle to grasp the act of walking we focus solely on that purpose. Once we focus on it enough it slips off into our subconscious and we no longer think of it again.
How aware are we at that point? Could we explain how to walk, how to fire our muscles in the exact sequence to take a step? How to sense our lack of balance and fire off even more muscles to compensate.
We, as a people, as a planet, saw ourselves in the mirror. It was 1968. The year we sent the first manned vessel into orbit. They returned with a mirror. It was a photograph of our planet. A chance to see ourselves from outside ourselves. An act of global enlightenment.
Those photo's gave birth to the Gaia theory. Gaia is the earth goddess, the theory being that our planet is simply a large single organism. It helps ease the daily stress of going to my 9 to 5 job to know that I'm doing my part. My only task is simple, breath in oxygen and breath out CO2, along with gathering plant and animal matter, ingesting it and converting it into a rich fertilizer sometimes called poopnuts. That's it, everything else is gravy.
I enjoy the arrogance of environmentalism. The notion that we can somehow save the planet, or that the planet needs saving, makes me smile. Could some miniscule bacteria living in our blood stream save us? How much of a role do they really play?
Will this organism we inhabit allow us to destroy it or are we simply an irritating insect on it's back? Once it notices us and we become enough of a nuisance it'll get around to dealing with us.