With all the perils lurking from the swamps and caves to present day, with the innumerable ways your blood line could have been snuffed out so you never would have had the chance to be here just as you are now, you’re the winner of a genetic lottery. Show some class and dignity and act like it, because every wasted day, every missed opportunity to grow, try or be, every easy way out you take, every unkindness to you or others is a direct insult to the line that lead to you through unwelcoming surroundings of wilderness, wars, famines, difficulty and even just plain old coincidence.

You’re not a tabula rasa. You’re the product of the compounded efforts of your ancestors, and you are by no means finished or fully actualized just by being here. Being born just means you’ve been given the chance to race – not against someone else but against who you were yesterday and who you could be tomorrow if you stop avoiding the difficult. New things are difficult by default. We still have no mechanisms to deal with them and lack the information to properly judge the situation. This is also good because it gives you a place to start. Each new situation is loaded with fresh information, not only about itself but about who you could be if you took it on. The gene structure in one part determined your major characteristics but it is malleable. Genes can shut off and dormant ones can turn on depending on your actions and this information will be transmitted as code into the next generation. Everything you do matters on a larger scale. The bigger the challenge you take the more of the dormant potentiality inside will turn on. The brain has plasticity but so do the genes.

Biological potentiality is a real thing, environment changes the genotype that came here and produces variations – phenotypes. Foxes moving to a climate with different vegetation will over generations develop the color of fur that will mimic that of their environment while their relatives that didn’t move wont. We adapt to the burdens we take on, and if you have some burdens, say thank you each and every day. It means that you have something of importance in your life and that you’re working on becoming the person that can handle it. If you were to ask any of your close ancestors what they want for you they would say “to live, and live well”, and this is how you redeem their sacrifices and all the lives that came before you, this is how you honor each branch of the meandering tree that led to your fork.