A Fish out of Water

What is a fish out of water?

Many times has that question been asked and many times not many people know exactly the answer. Is a fish out of water a struggling marine animal, slowly suffocating to death on the very thing that we hold dear to our own survival? Or is it an evolving species? Maybe, it’s the next dinner of the various predators that flock to the water’s shoreline; maybe it’s the next bird taking wing? Or maybe it’s the courageous chain in the pattern of creation that lasts a billion years. And of course, we can’t ignore the possibility that it can merely be a stupid fish.

However the optimist would like to think that it could never be a stupid fish, but any one of the above possibilities that indicate some type of positive progress. The pessimist would highly disagree and see that it is but the type of some negative progress; because obviously only a stupid fish would go land itself out of its protective habitat and hence deserves to be eaten. The realist would then claim that it’s a type of positive-negative progress in which for life to continue it must not only end but benefit yet another element of life (such as the fish dying to prevent overpopulation and the survival of the predators on that fish.) The dreamer would but laugh and say that it’s the evolution of fish to bird and that one day all fish will leap out of the water to land to sprout wings.

What all these explanations lack is the pure possibility of Descartes. Cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am). A fish out of water is nothing more than just a figment of our imagination and how we realize it depends solely on us.

But exactly how much is what we think, what we are? I think the fish is really the next bird taking wing. Yet how much is that my own belief? What I truly believe in? As the fish lies on the shoreline, deciding what it should be, it slowly begins to fall prey not to predators, per say, but rather to the circumstances around it. If there are no predators around, then obviously it cannot become the next meal. Yet, the only way it can either evolve or fly is with previous knowledge. Many of us take for granted the importance of such knowledge that eventually over time becomes implanted into us as genetic intelligence. And so hence, without really knowing how or why, the fish can suddenly sprout legs to walk on land, lungs to replace gills to breathe, and even wings to fly in the sky and create yet another species of birds. However, without previous knowledge and with the slow ticking of time it can lie there and slowly suffocate on the air that claims that fish cannot survive out of water.

I cannot say that my assumption is truly mines. Maybe I know, unconsciously, that fish can evolve and did evolve in our animalistic past. Maybe I am tapping into a part of my mind that is influenced by the various books I read (that themselves depend on some type of imagination) and hence I believe in evolution. Or maybe I am in an anti-religious mood and hence are claiming that everything is evolution. Or maybe I feel optimistic and hence would like to believe that fishes can be birds and can break through the barriers of what society says is and isn’t. Whatever I believe what a fish out of water is, it matters not. What does matter is how I came up with the idea and if I wait two years, would I still believe in that?