Four billion years for this. The lungfish hauled itself onto mud, gulping air that burned. The shrew went without water for a day and a night, tongue swollen, and lived. The woman walked to the frozen river at dawn and broke the ice with a rock to fill the skin, and carried it back before it could freeze again, and this was every single morning of her life.
And now you. You turn a metal handle and warm rain falls indoors, on command, in a small tiled room, as much as you want, hot as you like, and you stand in it with your eyes closed doing nothing. Doing NOTHING. The grandmother who rationed one kettle of heated water among six children is beside herself. There is a whole waterfall here and only one of you under it.
We do not fully understand it. You are not thirsty. You are not filthy from a hunt. You just stand there while clean warm water pours over the shoulders we spent an ice age building, and you make a low sound in your throat that we have never heard before, a sound with no danger in it at all.
Some of us think you are worshipping. The man who buried the seed corn through the hungry winter and did not eat it says no, look closer.
You are thinking. You do your hardest thinking here, under the falling water, about someone you love or something you said wrong. The whole ocean the fish crawled out of, brought back into the house, warmed, and given to you so you could stand in it and work out your small sorrows in private.
Take as long as you want. We are watching.
We would have crawled twice as far.