The first person to see a snake shed its skin probably had a severe panic attack. Change is weird in nature; moving is difficult and moving on can be even more so but imagine stepping out of your actual skin-suit?
These thoughts have been recurring lately as a gentleman of much movement. Several times over in under seven years I have found myself in a new environment. It is always jarring at first until it feels like all I know. This adaptation has shaped me in ways beyond my current ability to grasp and will evade that for many years to come.
We never discuss the trauma that reptiles likely harbour through this practice. Is it painful or refreshing? Maybe it’s painfully refreshing? Either way, the sensation is clearly indescribable. I’m certain there’s some know it all lying around in the grass somewhere with a peer-reviewed paper ready to sneak in with a disagreement. But what is the earth’s honest truth? Look, If a well-dress individual with charisma and gusto presented me with laboratory honed snake facts about the longs and shorts of shedding statistics, I would be more than inclined to agree. However, I could never with a straight face bet that that person wasn’t just some fanatic that I should be careful not to stumble into debate with. The kind of obsession that would encourage one to put a stethoscope within proximity of an animal no less than certainly classified creepy-crawly.
But I digress.
Forget the first human witness, what became of the first snake to experience this reptilian maneuver of evolution? I feel for her (please, don’t try to convince me it wasn’t a lady glider) as of late. I wonder if this is within our reach as humans, a phenomenon waiting in the distance. Yes, yes I understand that everyone and everything is constantly shedding skin yada yada but please tell me we can all recognize the drastic difference. Follicles and flakes falling off all the time doesn’t give me the same visual as simply unzipping myself from my head to my toes carefully and all in one piece until things are crisp again. Wrinkles = gone. A reward?... Or consequence of making it to 2050 and surviving climate change.
If my double handful of relocation is any indication of my mental and emotional capabilities to handle this situation, then all I can hope is that I’m not first, second or thousandth in line. I’ll be good to miss it all together and blog about it on obscure online forums to be honest with you. I’ve long maxed out my capacity for new stimuli.
Keegan Boisson-Yates