Human universals is the title of a book Don Brown wrote a few years ago about how much we humans are alike. Really cool book if you’re a nut case like me. I’m reading another crazy one at present about what makes us happy. This one is titled, How Pleasure Works and is written by Paul Bloom. This one starts out really weird and progressively gets better. For instance, we all have “sweet tooths” to a degree because, historically, anything that tasted sweet was NOT going to poison us. Our gathering ancestors picked and popped sweet after sweet. The bitter ones, not so much. Funny, huh.
Our ancestors enjoyed simple pleasures that make sense to our survival. Food , water, sex, warmth, rest, safety, companionship, and LOVE all have a practical survival feature to their pleasure. However, the study of our histories reveals a couple additional sources of joy that don’t make sense toward our need to survive. First, from as far back as our anthropologists can go, we’ve been taken by the need to express ourselves. We’ve drawn and we’ve scratched. Sure, you could argue that much of our early drawing were practical; we were drawing up battle plans. True enough.
However, this does not explain why drawings of the sun and the stars and of the beauty all around, abound. And, they make no sense. Even more impractical is our historical LOVE of song and dance. Our roots are that we’re all song and dance men and women. Even if we don’t like to sing, our great, great, great, great,great,great,great grandma sure did. Our ancestors LOVED to sing and this pleasure makes no survival sense.
Maybe just maybe these pleasures point us toward our design and, more importantly toward our designer. Maybe just maybe, these pleasures have been placed inside us to remind us that there’s more to life than just food, drink, and sex. Maybe just maybe, our love affair with art and our desire for beauty is a pointer to the beauty of our majestic creator, God. And, maybe just maybe, we are wired to break out in song and dance because He wired us to praise Him. Why else would we have wired this up from way back when?
Funny, huh.
I’m off to sing, praise, and worship. The dancing may take a little longer. I’ll save that for my Greek/Comanche…
BUILT TO LEAD 
running man