An Eventful Narrative

Mostly, what mostly happens continues
To happen in highly similar ways,

And this is true in war zones, soldiers say,
And in emergency rooms, nurses say,

And so on and so forth, mostly the same.
Our priors rarely need much updating,

And we might profitably consider
Our natural selection by this world

That proved our ancestors mostly boring
If occasionally terrifying.

The mind at peace with the world is patient
With anything our species didn’t make

Because patience is peaceful if nothing
Involving other humans is at stake.

Between the world of what mostly happens
And the weirdness our stories entertain,

However, there’s a huge discrepancy,
As great as between seawater and air,

Between neutral buoyancy and rock cliffs,
Between constant ocean temps and desert.

Bored, we find ourselves uncomfortable.
Entertained, we’re possessed by hope and shame.

Maybe it’s not because of us as beasts,
As such, as because of trade-offs we’ve made—

We, first amphibians on the margins
Between deep nature and cultivation.

We’ve survived thus far, at all, for being,
Not so well-adapted on breathing terms,

Just the first lunged lobefins to make a start
From what mostly is to raw narrative.