Carrizo Plain

The signs on the man’s van say, “No Gas, No Job, No Home, Nowhere to Go.”

Inside the gas station, the girl at the register takes my order for gasoline.  Her face is made up in a way that makes her look like a plastic toy.  She is thumbing through a Cosmetology textbook. 

At the gas station, while en route to the Carrizo Plain, I am reminded of the importance Southern California had in evolving my very simple rule for life.

So many of the world’s challenges are a product of us having rushed so quickly into this modern world of ours, and not really realizing that we are living under a set of circumstances that our grandparents could not have fathomed.

For most of my life, I’ve tried to make decisions about things based on whether it makes sense within the evolutionary context of our species.  This simple rule has always done me well with regards to how I should live and act in the modern world. 

I became an adult when I was living in Southern California, and that is the time that you start to make decisions about how you intend to stay healthy throughout your life, regardless of how well you follow through.  The dominant question for a twenty-year old in Los Angeles during the mid-1990’s was: what type of gym do you want to join or what kind of exercise machine should you buy from the television?

One-hundred thousand years ago, when our species foraged and scavenged on the savannahs of eastern Africa, we may not have had long life expectancies, but we were very, very fit, and we did things the way we were evolved to do them.

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