There’s a lot of news out in the world that can, from time to time, make us all a little discouraged about the human species. I don’t think I need to go into that in detail. Today I want to offer a personal reflection that gives me reason to be more positive about our prospects.

I was sitting in my office a while ago, feeling a little despondent about the future — mine and yours — when I looked up at a picture on my wall that I see every day. It’s a large photograph of the earth from space. Somehow this time the photo took my breath away, capturing my attention in a way it hadn’t before. I fell into a bit of a trance, and at a gut level I connected with a truth hard to grasp using intellect alone:

 “I am that.” 

It’s something I’ve long believed. After all, as modern science has revealed beyond any shadow of a doubt, I’m not some isolated human, and we’re not some isolated species, cut adrift from the rest of Life. We are Life. But now I felt the truth of that statement more personally. We are Life made conscious. That voice inside our head? Life learning to speak. The eyes below our brow? Life learning to see. The tragedies that befall us? Life learning to grieve. Our sense of humor that emerges even under the most trying circumstances? Life learning to gain perspective.

We’re not Life’s scourge, as some would claim. We’re something far more profound. We’re Life’s desire for more life. Will Life fail in this particular attempt at more? Perhaps. But when you look at Life’s 3.5 billion year journey so far and you plot the data points, the trajectory is one of success, not failure. Each success, by the way, gained at a high cost.

And the reasons for Life's success? Primarily the ability to cooperate in increasingly complex communities — an ability now stuffed into each and every one of the 100 trillion cells working together to create the human experience. We are, in other words, cooperation made manifest.

The case for cooperation being an inseparable attribute of who we are gets even stronger when we see how deep it runs. Because before single cells could cooperate to form multicellular organisms like us, there first had to be cooperative organelles to create the first single cells, and before that cooperative, free-living genes to form the genome upon which all else depends.

All of this brings to mind an analogy. As an acorn holds within its genetics the image of an oak tree, so we hold within our genetics the image of increasing cooperation and complexity. It’s why we’ve already traveled so far in that direction, aggregating ourselves first into families, then tribes, then villages, then states, then nation-states, and now, as global problems mount, facing the next aggregation: a planetary cooperative.

Of course, once again it won’t happen without pain, and most importantly it won’t happen without our consent. That’s the price, I imagine, of consciousness. Ultimately it must be a choice we make. But the path leading us in the right direction is well worn, reason enough for me to do my part.