Origins pt. 9

In 6th grade social studies we were all at our desks doing round robin reading about Mesopotamia. The textbook informed my 11 year old mind that "human civilization began 5,000 years ago." Immediately I was overcome by dread, a darkening of my senses as I felt overwhelmed by my misunderstanding that before Mesopotamia there was nothing, in those days not knowing the difference between humanity and civilization. It was a crushing moment of insignificance and tinyness when I first began to contemplate how pointless everything was. It's hard to quantify now why this so disturbed me, but it did, and that feeling comes back to me sometimes when I encounter evidence of the past like the pottery shards I've found in my wanderings across the Colorado Plateau. I wonder if I was the only one in Mrs. Gorrell's class at Cherry Run that day who had their head blown off by the impermenance of their world conception.