Pssst! You! Yeah, you... are a passenger on a planet... on a blue-green planet that's orbiting a golden star. And right now we are traveling through a part of our yearly orbit where our ocean is warm and welcoming. We yearn to return to the sea...

"Once upon a high tide - upon a very, very high tide, like the tides that we get with eclipses - our ancestors from the sea found themselves on an unplanned journey to land. There would be no return trip - no wave as high as this one for the rest of their lives."

How our oceanic ancestors re-invented themselves into land creatures is a story too primordial to appear in our history books. But my body tells me it's not lost...

I've been swimming in the ocean every week for over 20 years - swimming non-stop with my snorkel for an hour and a half. Staying in this long means that the me who leaves the water is not the me who entered it. No matter how big my problems are when I enter the water, they are never, ever problems when I emerge. To avoid sharks, I stay in the shallower waters, where I've discovered a workout that's inaccessible to most adults but is perfect for my 93-pound body that's only five-feet-tall. I navigate the narrow, twisting, treacherous channels between the coral reefs - treacherous because the ocean is in motion and coral cuts are painfully toxic. I wiggle my spine, flutter my arm-fins, rotate my wrists and work core muscles that my land-based self is totally unaware of. My body moves in ways that it does not and cannot move on land. As I break out of my land-based habits of moving, I become aware of dwelling in a body that has been fine-tuned by millions of years of evolution.

Scientists have discovered that our legs, arms, necks, shoulders and wrists were formed - and functioning - in our fishy ancestors who ended up on land. Yes, the genetic blueprint for our legs, arms, necks, shoulders and wrists is millions of years old.

So long as I remain on land, my body's aquatic history remains buried under layers of habitual, land-based ways of moving around. But when I'm in the ocean, experimenting with swimming among the corals, unturned pages of history begin to open up. I begin to read the primordial record that lives in my DNA. Yes, the lure of the sea is the lure of the ancient me.

On land my problems feel like problems. In the sea, I access the genetic memory of our fishy ancestors re-inventing themselves in order to live on land. My body remembers that problems are how life invites us to evolve. And life is not going to stop evolving any more than our little blue-green planet is going to stop spinning and orbiting.

This is Harriet Witt, your guide for this little ride on our passenger planet.


If you have any questions, drop Harriet an email: harriet@passengerplanet.com


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