My mother always felt I should be practical with regard to my career. Everything else was up to me, but she wanted me to be secure.

I doubt practical would be the first word to jump to the minds of people who know me, were you to say my name. And yet, it is perhaps the most indelible legacy my mother gave me.

She gave it to me without ever forcing me. Just the single consistent message that you should be able to earn a living with a respectable profession.

I think the world is full of artists who received the same message and bucked. I bucked, but never as much as I made out. At my most overtly oppositional, I still received A’s, B’s, and C’s. At my most irresponsible, I joined the Army – because I realized that I was wasting my family’s money partying in college and not passing all my classes. So even my rebellion carried a tinge of my mother’s pragmatism.

It’s the struggle between the my impulse, for impulsivity, and the ever present thought in my head, of what will come if you choose this? This struggle has formed who I am. My struggle to balance these two drives informs my daily life. It has encouraged me to look closely at my values and processes. It has driven me to look closely at the values and processes of others.

My mother’s greatest legacy to me may be life of internal struggle. My mother’s greatest gift to me is the courage and curiosity to face that struggle and grow with it.

The little, anything I do matters, may free me to do great things.

Right now, we are the state of the art in evolutionary technology. Great big specialized abstract thinking abstract communicating brains make us so.

But we are different from the technology we create. The evolutionary technology of which we are composed was built on much more ancient frameworks.

The human being is like a space ship built on a Model T frame. You might go to the moon, but don’t be surprised if you have to pull over and crank start several times on the way.

I get behind the wheel of a several thousand pound machine, possessing the power of over a hundred horses, and go flying down the road, dozens of miles per hour, every day. This is incredibly dangerous, and yet I think nothing of it. It’s not just that I’ve been conditioned to trust my vehicle. It’s also that our species hasn’t had sufficient time to develop a healthy inborn fear of the automobile. Who knows if the automobile will be around long enough for us to evolve that fear… but I digress.

Show me a large spider or snake, safely confined to a glass Alcatraz, from which there is no chance of escape, and watch me shiver. This fear, is no longer particularly helpful to most of us, but after millions of years of spiders and snakes biting primates we all have the wiring to fear them.

It’s that Model T wiring. The Model T will always think I’m driving a dirt road – even if I’m flying through space.

The Model T knows to fear pot holes, loose gravel, overly cold weather, but hasn’t got a clue about meteors and space trash.

So we are all petty. Because, up until very recently, there hasn’t been an animal alive that could really afford to be magnanimous.

Our big space ship brains have brought us historically unheard of security, but they can’t change the fact that we are all afraid to starve, to be ostracized, to be cold and alone.

These fears are baseless. I’m not going to starve. If you’re reading this, you’re very unlikely to starve either. And yet we people continue to engage in the petty squabbles of animals living on the margin. So afraid for our own existence that we will hoard and spend according to instinct rather than rational choice.

This isn’t meant as criticism. In most of the important ways, we are identical to our ape cousins. So we share their inborn fears, hopes, and passions. Of course we often behave like them. But we can overcome our hard-wiring in ways a chimp never will. We can stop; overcome our fear; and think about what we are doing. That is the only way I’m aware of to become fully human.

No, I’m not saying, we should devalue everything except cognition. I don’t want to be a fleshy computer. It’s the animal of me that gives my life richness and excitement. I’m just saying, that we can use the passion of our ancestors, in combination with the rationality our unique brains give us the capacity for, to find a balance between old technology and new.

Hate may steel my nerves, but it’s a cold cloak of armor.