keyword: progress, title: no missing link in misc. flash fiction

The popular notion of the word “evolution” mistakes it as a grand process heading toward some predetermined goal, as long as everything goes well. As if shrews were destined to become apes and then become women and men, as long as the fruits remained plentiful and no errant meteors came along to ruin the march toward a humanity. That’s not how natural selection works, that’s not how progress works, either. In all actuality, there is no such thing as progress at all.

We were fuzzy little things that skittered in the leaves and, by influence of surroundings and the occasional beneficial mutation, those furballs whose thumblings could oppose tended to survive to breed more often, those who could ambulate more upright-like tended to thrive. Thousands of generations later, we’re mostly-hairless things just sapient enough to know we’re scared, walking around with computers inside our pockets and the whole thing was just a process of seven trillion mistakes compounding upon each other. Nothing said we were going to end up like this, let alone were supposed to, it all just sort of happened. There is no missing link, because this isn’t a chain we can reliably follow out into the future, we are water gushing throughout the parched soils of causality, branching where seams in clay deem gravity will deposit us willy-nilly at entropy’s mercy, becoming what we “are” only in deepest hindsight.

Rome wasn’t just built over more than one day, Rome was built by accident. Some tribe found a cluster of defensible hills and dropped down stakes, there was no grand design to briefly rule the known world from there, just a clump of humanity, none far from of childhood, grabbing a shot at a life less brutish then time took its course over centuries. There was no progress only process.

Time is no arrow nocked and then shot in an arc, where as long as the elements hold true to the archer’s calculus, some distant target will surely be pierced. Time’s a rock thrown in haste by a blind idiot child, hitting what it will hit when it hits, if anything at all. It could land in the river sending ripples out for uncounted miles, it could thud to the ground without notice entirely.

There is no destiny but there are no curses either, if that’s even trade or not is up to you. In four hundred years, we could be living in the stars. Tomorrow, the bombs could fall, driving us back to the trees or off the ledgers entirely. There are only the choices we’ll make and that which will come forth regardless, there is only the now and the near-immediate future, everything else mere confections of confidence-artists and those frothingly-insane. When I was a much younger man, this realization would’ve scared the hell out of me. Now, slouching as I am toward middle-ages, knowing there’s no such thing as progress, well, it just helps me feel a bit closer to being free.