the geko

I once cut off a tail from a house gecko, nasty little thing wriggled for some time then stopped. I could have screamed, it was allowed I was a little boy after all. But the most shocking thing is that it grew right back after some time. Amazing right? Lucky enough I wasn’t daft as a child, if I was I could have cut off my own finger hoping it would grow back.

But thinking of how he grew back his tail makes me think of a possibility of correcting the wrongs I did in the past, like I’d just cut off the old tail and grow a new one. But it’s not that easy is it? It’s a bit more complex than that. For starters we are not reptiles: we are human beings, warm blooded.

My interpretation of this is that we have feelings and these feelings eternally hold us to our metaphorical tails. These feelings are like a storage space for the past, we remember how certain experiences made us feel and sort of re-live the moment. How an extra marital affair reminds us of young love, mischief and fresh sexual desire. We cannot avoid misdoings like those because feelings are addictive, we want to relive them, create new ones, and we cannot just get enough. But the gecko does not hold on to the past like a druggie to a Vail of opium, he can thus shed his tail if need be.

Fact 2: a gecko CAN grow a new tail if need be, whilst we can never really get to re-experience. After all it’s said you only live once. Get it right the first time because you’ll never get to try again. Take for example, a girl losing her virginity, she can only do it once because unlike the gecko she can’t grow back a hymen after losing it to her own father. Experiences weather good or bad are one of a kind, the rest are just similar. We can never re-experience in exactly the same way, no matter how hard we try.

Geckos have tails, human beings don’t. Geckos usually shed their tails when in danger, survival instinct built upon years and years of evolution. But evolution did not prepare us in any way for mental toughness required in the modern world. We don’t have media that we can easily let go of when threatened, all we do is take pounding after pounding after pounding. We usually don’t have an option. A raped girl does not leave her feelings of hate, anger, violation and vengeance with her perpetrator but she carries them, like a scar if you like, visible to every naked eye or masked behind layers of make-up applied carefully by well-trained shrinks. We can’t let go of our pasts, our wrongs no matter how much we try to forgive and forget.

The human mind is complex, we may never understand it but what we know is we can never let go of the past just accept that we are now a tail-less gecko. And look forward to the future, dwelling on our pasts will not give us the tail we so crave.

-kk