The Mind: An Excellence and Incompetence.

Breathing is fairly easy, truth be told. It’s all inhale, exhale -it’s not all that difficult to get a hang of to be honest. We can call that the bottom of the skill tree, the roots really. It’s very much the easiest skill a person could ever be expected to master. Those who don’t get the hang of it don’t typically get very far. There aren’t a great deal of those, though, thankfully. I’ve personally seen a great many people breath competently in my time, some of them even babies. Even that one dimwit from high school who held the absurd notion that a gorilla could beat a bear in a fight could breath. I mean, we all know that a bear is much heavier than a gorilla, has the advantage of claws, a higher bite force, longer fangs, a reach advantage, a strength advan- I digress… Breathing is easy, I don’t even remember figuring it out, and I haven’t forgotten how to manage it since. I can even multi-task it with walking, running, reading, writing or dancing. I mean seriously, it’s so easy I can do it in my sleep. 

Moving up the height of the skill tree, we find the grass around that mighty oak (the most skillful of the trees) bristling up against the sides of eating. Eating is also a simple, beginner-level ability that comes quite without effort to the vast majority of it’s practitioners. Granted, there was a more rigorous demand for basic motor skills for eating but even so, it usually isn’t more than most people can chew, so to speak. It’s a two part procedure: chew and swallow. Both are fairly fundamental muscle movements that don’t require any kind of specialist training. The average human jawbone weighs less than a kilogram, so chewing shouldn’t be an issue. Food isn’t especially heavy either -unless one plans to ingest heavy metals, which I do not recommend- so the untrained tongue is generally sufficient for the transportation of food to the windpipe. Then it’s only the epiglottis and the trachea that do any real work to follow through with the process. Theres an argument to be made that the transport of food from the external source into the mouth in the first place should count as part of the process, but I find myself without the inclination to include that step, or the inclination to explain that exclusion. I can eat more or less anything thats edible, not to brag, from crackers to marshmallows; from taffy to sea-side rock. 

These exhilarating examples of human prowess -my own and otherwise- have been employed thus far to evidence and exemplify a very simple but startlingly impressive fact: humans are very good at learning to perform (sort of) complex tasks from an incredibly early age. Babies can breath and eat from birth! As a species, we possess an unrivaled receptivity to new concepts and processes. Our capacity for mastery is the kind that allows us to raise our limitations from the rudimentary tasks aforementioned to undertakings of an incredible scale. The hallowed canopy of the mighty Yggdrasil, where from it’s mighty gold-thread branches the very fruits of knowledge hang. Rocket science: crossing a stellar ocean with depth that runs beyond deep, tearing apart any misconception of significance in the weight of it’s nothingness. Genetic engineering: peering into the very foundations of life itself, deconstructing the base units of an autonomous, thinking being and correcting, improving on god’s own work. Artificial intelligence: turning scraps of code into the very facsimile of personhood, a modern homunculus. From Aristotle to Hawkings, we stand today on the shoulders of intellectual giants who have wrought sense from madness and caged reason about the random of the world. They, and great men and women like them, set the precedent for human brilliance from learning themselves how to breath and eat like myself and the rest of my kin and kith. I have inherited a world where I preside over wind, water, sun and shadow, keeping nature at my beck and call with ice and fire tied to my leash. From the outstretched arms of a parade of geniuses, we have taken, all of us, a goblet set of wisdom unparalleled. I assert myself, my peers and my world to be a band of polymaths the like the world has never seen. 

Like them, I learned to breath. Like them, I learned to eat. From them I inherited a world I understand.

So. Why. Can’t. I. Whistle.

Ok, fine, maybe I didn’t go on about breathing for no reason. Maybe the aside about eating was a distraction. But this is the real lean cut of my sirloin tantrum let me tell you now. Whistling. Is. Impossible. I have no idea what I’m doing wrong or why everyone else seems to pick it up so easily. Hypothetically it’s all the same to breathing, yes? No? Is that where I’m going wrong? I didn’t think so, anyway. Maybe it’s the mouth shape that I’m getting wrong, or I’m blowing too hard. Or not hard enough. That could be it.

It wasn’t it. I feel lightheaded.

When I was younger -as my Mother will recount for you with Shakespearean precision if you ever give her the chance- I was chosen as narrator for my Year 1 production of the Nativity. A crowning moment of my theatre career, as I’m sure you can well understand. Now, I hear you cry, isn’t that impressive that I could read at the tender age of 5? An entire nativity play with long words, full sentences and all? Well, I do hope that you’re set down for when I tell you that I couldn’t read at all. I had the entire thing memorized. Yep. Take it in. Not to toot my own horn overmuch, or to try to display the height of my achievement as my performance of the nativity, but this side plot goes some ways towards making the point that I do not consider myself a simpleton. I would normally consider myself well equipped to wrestle with philosophical, scientific, mathematical. So how exactly is it that the principle of pushing air through my lips in such a way as to produce a note. I can sing (not particularly well, albeit) and that’s more or less the same thing, right? I can make noise through the manipulation of complex sounds, ergo I can can make noise through the manipulation of simple sounds. Wrong. Wherein the flaw lies in my logic I could not say, it screams at me in that inaudible dog whistle as I chase my own tail in an attempt to find my hidden faults. Failing, I turn to roll around in the grass.

I’ve been trying for a week now, and my mouth is sore and buzzing with a warm and pinching static. I’ve looked online, I’ve asked my friends, but nobody can give me a straight answer. One of them answered by whistling in my face. I cannot repeat here the words I had for him at the time.

So I guess I’ll just keep trying. I’ll let you know if I get anywhere, unlike my not-whistle, this is all getting a bit one-note and I’d rather not end up a no-trick pony.