balcony rail instinct

We are not instinctive, I once read, humans must think first, we don’t act by instinct as salmon head home to spawn or bees fly back to the hive with pollen, or as birds mate adulterously in the predawn for protection of the species. Or as cats' nature is to chase and kill. 

And we have a couple of birdbaths in the yard that are fun to watch from the house, that we must leave alone because if their location is shifted even a foot it confounds the birds, who come flying up and skid to a stop in midair that the birdbath is no longer exactly where it was even if it’s a foot away in plain sight. Instinct, something instinctual, or at least learned unconsciously and stored.

It was said that our only instinct is survival, a survival instinct. But there’s more. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) wrote that in each of us there is implanted a “sense of the infinite” that causes us to be religious. I have a new and unread book about this that I’ve just started, hope it isn’t lost in our moving process, also hope that when I find it and resume reading, it doesn’t continue boring me to screaming tears. There may be an instinct in humans to believe in God, for whatever reasons including the survival instinct. It may be an evolved instinct, seeing that other animals don’t have it. 

Although who knows, porpoises, bottle-nose dolphins that come up to our boats, may think we’re gods, and the space between sea surface and blue dome is heaven and when they die they’ll become humans. Religious instinct in porpoises. With porpoises as with us, of course, just because they believe it, that don’t make it so.

Though who knows. We also believe some pretty goofy stuff. Dogma or doctrine doesn't make so.   

But the mind strayed, my focus was instinct in humans. Maybe we have more in us, more than self-survival and a sense of the infinite. An article in the New York Times this morning, “Cave Paintings in Indonesia May Be Among the Oldest Known” has a picture of splatter painted human hands, that has been dated at least 39,900 years old. 

Judging by myself with crayons at very young age, scolded for drawing on the wall and then spanked for doing it again because I couldn't stop myself, and by all the cave art that’s been discovered here and there all over the world, maybe there’s something instinctive about human response to a blank wall. 

One thing I do know. I sure love sitting out here looking at the moon and listening to the surf, waves crashing ashore. 

But I’m satisfied with the horizon: the survival instinct keeps me from leaning over the railing to look at the beach fifteen floors below. 

T+ in +Time