Someone who died three thousand years ago may have had your eyes.
Not eyes like people in general.
Eyes that would make somebody who knows you stop for a second.
The same heaviness above the lid.
The same distance between them.
The same slight narrowing when something seems suspicious.
Maybe the mouth was close too.
Perhaps the person smiled from one side first, exactly as you do.
We will never know.
No photograph was there to survived.
No mirror kept the image.
The person lived, laughed, worried about something that seemed terribly important, and disappeared into the enormous crowd behind us.
And what a crowd it is.
By one widely used estimate reflected in the material behind this posting, roughly 117 billion human beings have lived.
Pause there.
Not eight billion.
Eight billion is only the living room.
More than a hundred billion have already walked through the house.
That changes the meaning of:
“You look familiar”.
We Usually Think the Statement Means Memory
Someone looks at you a little too long.
“Have we met?”
No.
“Did you go to school in Miami?”
No.
“You look exactly like somebody I met.”
We smile.
We shrug.
Funny coincidence.
Then we move on.
But perhaps we've been asking the wrong question.
Instead of asking, Where has this person seen me?
Ask:
How many opportunities has the human face had to look familiar?
Now the sentence becomes much larger.
Because your face did not arrive in a world containing seven other faces.
It arrived after tens of billions of them.
Eyes have been tried before.
Noses have been tried before.
Jawlines.
Cheekbones.
Hairlines.
Complexions.
Heights.
Builds.
Smiles.
Frowns.
That peculiar expression people make when they know someone is lying but haven't decided whether to say so.
Again and again.
Different people.
Different lives.
But nature keeps working with recognizable human material.
We Notice the Exception
This is where the mirror fools us a little.
We stand in front of it and examine one result.
Our result.
Maybe we like what happened.
Maybe we don't.
Maybe the beauty lottery paid particularly well.
A face that attracts attention.
A body, a particular age, or culture happens to admire.
Hair that behaves.
Eyes people remember.
There is nothing imaginary about the advantages beauty can sometimes bring.
But beauty may distract us from the more astonishing thing.
We notice the unusually beautiful face because it appears exceptional.
We don't notice that nearly everything making it recognizable as a human face is common.
The extraordinary sits on top of the ordinary.
And somehow the ordinary is what we stopped seeing.
More Than a Hundred Billion
Try to imagine 117 billion people.
You can't.
Neither can I.
Our minds weren't built for it.
So, make it smaller.
Imagine a stadium with 100,000 people.
Now fill another.
And another.
Keep filling them until the number becomes ridiculous.
Then remember that every seat contains a face.
Every face has expressions.
Every person has mannerisms.
Every person tilts a head, squints into light, laughs, cries, becomes impatient, grows tired.
Every one combines familiar human elements differently.
Yet the ingredients keep returning.
The mathematical material behind this posting describes the basic problem simply: human features vary enormously, but within biological constraints.
Large number of possibilities.
Even larger number of opportunities.
That does not mean an exact copy of you must have existed.
It means something more believable and, I think, more interesting.
Pieces of what you think of as “you” have almost certainly been here many times.
Your eyes need not be new.
Your smile need not be new.
Your posture need not be new.
The combination feels new because this is the first lifetime you have experienced it.
That isn't the same thing.
We Have Spent a Lot of History Studying Differences
This is where the thought starts becoming uncomfortable.
Human beings have always been remarkably good at discovering reasons why one group should stand apart from another.
The ruler gets the crown.
Someone else bows.
One family has the bloodline.
Another does not.
One person wears silk.
Another is forbidden the color.
Uniforms distinguish authority.
Jewelry signals position.
Clothing announces wealth.
Names announce ancestry.
Beauty creates another hierarchy.
Skin, tribe, language, birthplace, class.
Again and again we have enlarged differences because differences are useful when somebody wants the world arranged into us and them.
Power likes distinctions.
They make excellent borders.
But the human body keeps quietly ruining the argument.
A king grieves with the same face as the servant.
A queen's tears are made of the same water.
A victorious general laughs with muscles shared by the people he defeated.
The infant born in the palace arrives helpless.
So does the infant born outside its walls.
Strip away the crown, uniform, title, jewelry, inherited name and carefully guarded importance...
and the ancient human pattern is still standing there.
Two eyes looking out.
A face that can fear.
A body that gets hungry.
A person who wants to be loved.
Familiar.
Perhaps That Is Why We Work So Hard at Being Separate
There is an odd possibility here.
Maybe we emphasize visible difference precisely because commonality is so overwhelming.
We need names.
Clothes.
Titles.
Styles.
Flags.
Possessions.
Achievements.
We decorate the shared human form and say:
This one is me.
And we are right.
There has never been another lifetime containing exactly your sequence of memories, relationships, choices, accidents, pleasures and losses.
That matters.
But the mistake comes when we extend that uniqueness too far.
My lifetime is unique, slowly becomes:
Everything about me is singular.
That is harder to defend.
The face in the mirror carries history.
So does the body beneath it.
So do the expressions crossing it.
We inherited before we invented.
Think of the Person Three Thousand Years Ago
Let's return to those eyes.
Maybe that person lived beside a river.
Maybe there was a child to feed.
Maybe somebody was sick.
Maybe harvest had been poor.
Maybe there was a ruler whose name everybody was expected to know.
History might have recorded that ruler.
It probably did not record this person.
That's another trick history plays.
We inherit long lists of kings, queens, emperors, generals and wealthy families because power leaves monuments.
The billions leave something quieter.
Mostly Us.
Not their names.
Their continuities.
Features carried forward.
Bodies carried forward.
Expressions.
Instincts.
Ways of caring for children.
Ways of fearing strangers.
Ways of making friends.
The ordinary things did not receive statues.
They received descendants.
And even where no direct line connects two people, the human pattern continues its variations.
That anonymous person disappeared.
The familiar elements didn't.
Eight Billion Are Here Now
And this is where the number becomes almost comic.
After more than a hundred billion human lives, another eight billion of us are currently walking around convinced that our arrangement is terribly particular.
We choose our shirt.
Fix our hair.
Check the mirror.
Worry about the photograph.
Notice who is beautiful.
Notice who is different.
Notice who belongs to which category.
Meanwhile, everywhere around us, the larger evidence is standing in plain sight.
We resemble one another.
Profoundly.
Not identically.
That's the beauty of it.
Variation is real.
Individuality is real.
But so is repetition.
So is inheritance.
So is common structure.
So is the astonishing fact that behind every attempt to divide humanity into finer and finer pieces, the pieces stubbornly continue looking like parts of the same thing.
You Look Familiar
Maybe that's why the statement feels warmer now.
“You look familiar.”
Perhaps you should.
There have been more than a hundred billion chances for familiar human elements to appear.
Before your grandparents.
Before their grandparents.
Before photography.
Before modern nations.
Before most of the names we use to separate ourselves existed.
Faces looked into other faces.
People noticed beauty.
People envied status.
Rulers elevated themselves.
Ordinary people fell in love.
Children laughed.
Parents worried.
Someone mourned somebody they thought they could never live without.
And somehow life continued.
Until eventually it reached the person in your mirror.
You.
Entirely yourself.
And yet made from a human story so old and so repeatedly expressed that perhaps the remarkable thing was never that you looked unlike everyone who came before.
Perhaps the remarkable thing is how much of them can still be recognized in you.
Tomorrow morning, when you look into the mirror, you will probably see yourself first.
That's natural.
But stay another second.
There are more than a hundred billion people standing somewhere behind that reflection.
No crowns.
No titles.
No rankings.
Mostly no names we remember.
Just humanity, passing its familiar pieces forward.
