It feels good to sleep between the right sheets, especially when the weather is hot. Apparently there is some science behind this. While the specifics get complicated based on material type, the concept is fairly straightforward: a balance between thread count and weave creates for a cooler sleeping experience. The more sheets breathe, the better humans rest.
I can’t help but pause to consider the language used to describe a sheet’s ability to let the human skin respire during repose. As we breathe, so do our sheets. It probably shouldn’t be a surprise; sheets are, after all, just reusable skins we manufacture to help our biologic ones maintain homeostasis when we enter nightly states of semi-hibernatory suspension. Natural selection has adjusted for many things, over millions of years. And the largest human organ – the skin – is an amazing feat of evolutionary manifestation. But humans still need supplemental shells during our daily routines. We don’t just cloak ourselves because of modesty. We can’t survive in most climates, awake or not, without doing so.
Plenty of species don’t have this problem. They use hair, burrows, nests, even other bodies to maintain body warmth by night. They spread wings, flap ears, roll in mud, and use various other techniques by day to keep cool, to regulate. Sure, some four-legged friends tolerate knitted sweaters or blankets, depending on situation or odd human whim. For the most part, however, the natural world has not sacrificed organic solutions for manufactured ones. Humans seem to be the only species unable to survive without fabricated assistance.
This is not an idle critique; I’m pleased to wear clothing and sleep between percale, sateen, or cotton. There is nothing wrong with our requirement for attire. It demonstrates innovation, practicality, and plenty of flair and personality. What other species has figured out how to create enveloping spheres of protection around itself, changeable based on season, replaceable following repeated use? We are animals of verticality, our orientating centers of operation positioned at the very top of our physique. We conduct the business of daily life, for the most part, upright and awake. What we know matters most, what we can do with that knowledge, where it can take us and the planet we inhabit, how we are able to continuously respond to changing needs, predict futures, survive, and grow.
Hold on a second. There may indeed be other species that have figured out a thing or two about protection. Upon further reflection, my mind is now flooded with images of floral and faunal adaptability to weather and environment that make our clothing and bedding discoveries seem less impressive. I should be careful to differentiate between ingenuity and necessity. After all, humans never intentionally decided that we didn’t need body hair or woolen skin. We didn’t consciously, as a species, choose fire over fur. It just happened, as did the drive to knit, weave, cut, and sew natural and synthetic fibers into a myriad of physical shapes and sizes. We had to sort all that out – in order to survive.
But even that’s not quite right. Humans didn’t have to spread themselves out across the entire planet. We could have remained within a band or two of longitude and latitude that didn’t require complex adaptation. We might have been satisfied to keep our species scope and locale somewhat more circumspect.
That is clearly not our style. “Have consciousness will travel!” seems our motto. The infusion of thought and language has fueled an almost insatiable desire for movement. Unable to sit still, the human species has become obsessed with exploration, typically in and of the external world. A place that has not been trod by our footwear, on earth or outside our atmosphere, is a destination, somewhere we should go. It’s actually not a bad axiom, this restless drive to brave terra incognito. Discoveries abound because of it. So does our knowledge of the universe and its cosmos. Bipeds now fly, hover, and voyage to geographies unimaginable to previous species, generations, and millennia. We just need new types of shells, more innovative traveling shells and transportation skins, to take us to these places, and hopefully return us home.
“Home.” The word lands deep within. I feel it in my gut, despite the sensation from the soft chair on which I sit while I think about apparel, travel, and notions of returning. My skin, with its trillions of cells and sensors, appreciates the chair’s cushion, the shirt and shorts on my body, the fan blowing cooling air above my head. My sense of being, however, seeks something else. It recognizes home as something far different than walls, roof, and floor enclosing my rather feeble physical form. Nestled within that sensation of release I have in response to the idea of returning home lies a longing to belong to something well beyond my dermatologic border, a desire, nay, an awareness, that I already am part of something bigger, something more intricate, something more interwoven than the seamless layer of cells covering my unique constellation of sinew, organ, and physical structure. I am awareness, or at least that awareness, the knowing that my gut has which my brain does not. I am not simply a machine motored by physique, manufactured by genes, commanded by brain. There is not some little version of me, the proverbial homunculus, seated in a control tower within an encased hard shell balanced precariously atop my human verticality who is running the show. There is something more. My gut knows this. What type of envelope holds such awareness? What sort of skin, spiritual or ethereal, lets such awareness find inspiration? How thin is the skein of interconnection between my awareness, yours, and that of every living organism and creature respiring in one way or another in the world today?
I am beginning to realize that more threads in a life do not necessarily result in a better braid of being. At least when it comes to a sense of home, a more balanced weave between go and be may bring less bounded space for me to breathe.