ALL OUR GENERATIONS

This is annoying. What I've posted is an essay but I'm limited to calling it a story.

Religion and gods, theisms or atheisms aside, we're here on planet Earth and best evidence is we only have one shot at being here. Oh, I know there are optimists who drawl on about returning as butterflies or natterjack toads, but they haven't got a shred of evidence suggesting that they might, and anyway I doubt they'd be best pleased if they did. But no matter what corner of creation I peer into there doesn't seem to be any possibility that we have a second life on Earth, albeit as something (or maybe even somebody) else. It's all make-believe and fantasy to suggest that we do.

There are, of course, people around who are totally convinced they were somebody else in a past life. I've heard them spouting their nonsense, maybe of being a courtier in the palace of a great king or queen in the past, or maybe even that king or queen him/herself. I've heard tell of quite a few Cleopatras, and not one of them has been particularly convincing. And I'm aware there are people who were in the court of, say, Henry V111, and helped him dress in the morning or charmed his mistresses when he was having an off-day and didn't feel like charming anyone. The worrying thing is most people back then weren't courtiers, but lived harsh and hungry lives on the land and the spooky thing is I've never heard of anyone claiming to be one of those ordinary, underfed and overworked villeins in a previous life. It seems a personal acquaintance with royalty is favourite and the only thing worth “remembering”.

It is, of course, all a load of nonsense. We do only have the one life and there's precious little point in trying to work out ways and means of reality being any different from that. This business of previous and future lives is just another branch on the tree of optimism. The hardest thing for any sentient being to come to grips with is the fact that he's mortal. That there will be a time when he won't exist at all, that he'll be an ex-person and bereft of the tiniest signs of life. That, in short, he'll be dead. And we know, don't we, that the only certainty when we were born is that one day we'll die.

And the cry goes up what's it all been about, then? What next? That can't be all there is! I mean, we learn stuff, invent stuff, make love to our dear ones, do all sorts of things �" and all for nothing? No: that can't be the case, there must be something else.

And, of course, there is. If we've been ordinary people living ordinary lives we've fathered or mothered children who go on to father and mother even more children. That's our immortality, in a way, though we mustn't get too patriarchal/matriarchal about it. In this kind of immortality we pass on our genes so that others can live and grow and love and shag and do all the things that mortals do, but those genes weren't actually one hundred per-cent ours when we were born, were they? They were a gift from our own parents, and they didn't actually own them either. They were a gift, to them, from our grandparents (their parents).

So if we return in a future life it's our genes that do the returning. It's our genes that contribute to the future of mankind, whatever that future may be. And when we say our genes we actually mean the genes we've had in our custody for the duration of our lives. In actual fact, they're not really ours at all because there's so much of other people in them. And they weren't our parents' genes either. No man or woman can claim to actually own their genes.

Here's a way of looking at it. Let's take a look at a family that, on average and over the generations, managed to produce two children. So Mr and Mrs Anybody with their two children have four parents of their own (two for Mr and two for Mrs) and a generation ago those four parents each had two parents of their own, making eight. So a second generation back (or forty years if we allow twenty years for each generation to live to the point of breeding) our genes were scattered between eight people. We had eight ancestors. And they were each the product of two parents, making, a further generation back, sixteen people. Sixteen ancestors from whom we've inherited our genes.

You can probably see the way the mathematics is going and anyway I wrote about it before, nine or ten years ago. It's a kind of neat mathematical progression in which the number of our ancestors doubles every twenty years. So it's 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024 and so on �" and that's less than 200 years. If you go back a couple of thousand years, multiplying by two the number of ancestors for each generation, you easily get to the point where your own ancestors number more than all the people who have ever lived. So if you live in the western world you're almost certainly related in some distant way to every other person who also lives in the western world, and probably through quite a lot of different strands. Julius Caesar? You mean my uncle a few times removed?

And that was Caesar's immortality, though his genes weren't his, of course. They had their origin far away from his Italian homestead. They had their origin in Central Africa where all of our ancestors climbed out of the trees as climate change altered the forests into rolling grasslands. And deep in us, in each and every one of us, there's a tiny bit of that ancient DNA, the one proudly passed from one generation to the next in darkest Africa. But it wasn't truly theirs. They inherited it from their predecessors, just like us.

And that's why I said forget religion or theisms or all that stuff. The truth, the real story, is neat, is tidy and is buried in all of us, in our genes.