Thoughts On Nature
I like to keep panoramic thoughts like this simple. Not by choice—but when it comes to nature, the human species is no more capable of ultimate insight here than any other species. We just have the audacity to excessively often think we know more than we really do know.
For me it starts with the logic that wherever there is a gift, there must be a gift giver. Nature is clearly a gift. It has been around for billions of years. That itself is a real stretch for our species to imagine. The gift giver in this case I will call God, perhaps so I have a God just like so many others have a God. God, for most people, comes with a lot of details and rituals, and seems to follow the same pattern ever since humans have been around. Most people inherit a particular God described in their inherited (or marriage) bestowed religious sect, a religious sect which always contains some sort of scripture written by humans many years ago, but interestingly, mostly about the same period in history, and never by any prophet themselves. Maybe it was the fad back then. This inherited God is available for personal communication, protection, and a trip to some sort of heaven after death. Going to this heaven, of course, requires adherence to particular scripture, certain rituals, and assorted beliefs, some of which become obviously a tad ridiculous with advancing times and knowledge. Most importantly, for sins committed, there is always a path to forgiveness. After all, we are all going to sin, it is just a matter of to what extent, and so without forgiveness, who would ever get to heaven? The problem with forgiveness is what about, for example, the victim of a murder? How do they compete to get to heaven? Or do they get automatic admission? But if they do, wouldn’t the quickest and easiest way to heaven be through being murdered? “Oh what a tangled web we weave…….”. Early on sacrifices were a way to gain God’s forgiveness with a lot of animals and hapless humans sacrificed as gifts to God. There is still some of that with suicide bombers, and religious slaughter of heathens. Plenty of humans still kill as a path to Heaven.
I can’t find in history a clear example of God having any chosen people. Not that numerous groups haven’t claimed such a thing. Yet, I am not aware today that there are any chosen people who are less likely to die from diseases, or death on a battlefield, or being hit by a car, or any other typical way to die. The frequency of death from all causes seems to be the same for Jews, Muslims, Christians, and so on—if the environmental circumstances are the same. Of course the praying goes on regardless, mostly as a means to cover all bases and to create some sort of hope for the matter at hand.
With all the above to go on, I don’t spend a lot of time pretending I can describe God, or pretend to have communication with Him. The past and the future seem to be dependent on some sort of evolutionary process that we learn more and more about with time. From what we now have learned about this process it is surely not willy-nilly or random. There are laws in existence which govern the process, and I simply assume God created the laws which govern the evolutionary process. There seem to be no evidence whatsoever that any of us are immune from these laws. And no, there is no sanctity of life on any individual basis. We are all going to die, the created process seems to insist on it. We either learn to deal with this reality, or we suffer greatly from our fear of death.
If we cannot spend pleasant times communicating directly with God, except via illusions, then the next best thing is to understand, as best we can with our own limitations, how the evolutionary process works. Most of us spend a lot of time being impressed with human creations or particular humans or particular human situations. This is natural enough, and we spend our formative years learning enough to engage successfully in such endeavors in our productive years. If we survive our productive years relatively intact, then only fools keep trying to believe that their time of being productive, in these kind of productive period endeavors, has not ended. Our time on the stage is over, and our character has died. We can either go gently down the stream or make an ass of ourselves trying to constantly swim upstream.
This leaves nature, our past experiences, and our unique personality with which to shape our terminational years. The best companions in our terminational years can be found out in nature. The humans with which we once had such meaningful relationships are far away, dead, or no longer very relevant to our lives. It is out in nature we begin to realize that the only constants in the evolutionary process are genetics, change, diversity, chance, time, and progress (not in a smooth progression, but with periods of reversal and stagnation). All of us, to varying degrees, spend so much of our life fighting change, diversity, chance, time, and progress as if we ourselves were controlling the evolutionary process. Individually we are dispensable, like it or not. If Abraham Lincoln had not been the President to free the slaves, some other President would have. If the Wright brothers had not invented the airplane, some one else would have. If Roger Bannister had not broken the 4 minute mile someone else would have. And that is how it goes. No individual is indispensable in the evolutionary process.
None of us are free to be whatever we want to be. We may have the right to choose whoever we want to marry but this quest is not what we pretend it to be. We aren’t free to pick out the best person we can find to marry at all. The best we can do is compete with those at our own level of marriage desirability. The ugliest guy in the class doesn’t bother to ask the prettiest girl in the class to the prom. He is not really free to do that at all. The poorest student in class is not free to go the Harvard. The least athletic are not free to be athletic stars. So it goes, on and on. And all is not as it often seems either. The most attractive people are much more likely to have a series of divorces than the less attractive. The best athletes often have a much more difficult time achieving any contentment after the glory days are over. The wealthiest people, whether they earned their wealth or inherited it, are rarely pictures of contentment. I once was a live-in chauffeur for a very wealthy widow for a short period of time and wow, I never saw a clan of more unhappy people than her whole family clan. They had nothing really to fuss about, but they fussed about everything, almost all the smallest of matters. Their wealth was useless. No one views Donald Trump as a picture of contentment.
So what then is really left for us to be individually content about? If we cannot be individually significant or eternal, what can we be? I reckon, when out in nature, feeling the vastness, diversity, and endless uniqueness of all the components, we can at least achieve a genuine gratitude for ever having had the chance to be a part of such a process. We got here by chance, that’s the way the evolutionary process works, and it seems a tad inane to think God individually created us just like it would be inane to say God personally created Hitler. Why would any merciful God do that? If God intended to short circuit the evolutionary process everything would have been perfect from the start. Or so it would seem to me. These days, the most meaningful reality is out in nature. Any true interaction with nature does not leave us feeling superior to anything else in nature. What a preposterous thing for anyone to believe that “God gave us dominion over the animals, plants, and material aspects of nature”. That is a really huge self serving notion. If dinosaurs had our brain power, they certainly would have thought they had dominion too. When I stand next to a giant redwood tree, it is a tad ridiculous for me to feel any superiority. Sure the tree cannot laugh, but then it cannot cry either. The tree cannot be happy, but then it cannot be sad, or angry, or jealous, or depressed etc. I could potentially live to be a hundred years old, but the redwood tree has the potential to live for thousands of years. I can be killed off a thousand different ways but a redwood tree has withstood numerous assaults, including forest fires over thousands of years. Only our species can take them down, and we eagerly did, early on, especially the biggest and oldest of them. I am well aware of death, the redwood tree has no such notion to fret about. While humans have invented the notion that the world is a contest of evil vs good (God vs the Devil), the evolutionary process sees everything in terms of useful and useless, adaptive to change and unadapted to change. Useful survives and uselessness does not and we get progress—a progress that has been proceeding for billions of years.
The big difference between the “lowly” earthworm and us is that the earth worm came first and was part of the process from which we eventually evolved, and the earthworm has not the vaguest sense of it’s role in the process, or it’s death whereas we, to differing degrees, do. We and the earthworm, are just different, not one more important to the process than the other. Well, I will hedge a bit here since we currently are busy being the direct cause of one of the biggest species extinction periods in evolutionary history. Other extinction periods were caused by changes in climate more so than one species driving the others to extinction. Well, not to worry, Mother Nature always bats last. If we can’t practice responsible reproduction the evolutionary process will make us pay dearly for it.
I always return from my hours in nature immensely more mellow, contented, and relaxed than before these little peregrinations. And I use the term nature in the broadest sense. I can return from meandering around some unique city neighborhood and have the same sense of connection to the evolutionary process. My favorite ‘friends’ in nature are the Redwood trees. They are so immense, so durable (some have been around thousands of years). There would even be older such trees except humans cut them down for bragging rights.
I no more condemn humans for their ignorant behaviors than I would any other species, past or present, for their imperfections. The evolutionary process deals with such imperfections—that is what we called progress. In spite of ourselves, humans have progressed too. We don’t, as least as often, disembowel someone in public like we used to for punishment, or burn witches at the stake, and so on. Of course some, in growing numbers, are finding a need to gun down little children or classmates, or just people in random, but all this just reflects that we are overpopulating the earth, and overpopulation produces this pent up feeling of the world being ‘too much in our face’ these days. All these instant communication devices have the downside of information overload, and much of the information is emotionally explosive to us, sometimes to the point we just lose it.
At lot of successful aging has to do with letting go. Death is, for all practical purposes, by a thousand cuts until there is precious little left to lose. It is quite normal for parents and siblings to let go after the formative years and offspring become quite independent. Continued dependence is more abnormal. Those who fail to become independent after the formative years pay a price. This has nothing much to do with losing respect for each other at all. Often distance leads enchantment to the view and holiday gatherings become ever more so rewarding. The myriad communication devices make it ever more difficult to let go. After years of communicating with parents twenty times a day with text messaging, it is hard to stop, and failure to stop simply limits one’s world more to the same old, same old, people. For most people it is probably healthier to have endless new meaningful relationships with others. We should never forget that people build people, and warding oneself off away from people in our productive years does not bode well for contentment or invigorating challenges. Of course people are all different so there is no hard fast formula to follow—just endless opportunities to appreciate diversity.
Since diversity is such an important factor in the evolutionary process we need resist trying to pretend otherwise. Early on in life I took this Science Teaching Methods course in which the Professor asked me to identify the best way to teach a certain scientific concept. I responded that there probably was no best method. The guy became apoplectic over my answer and demanded to know why I would say such a thing, and for what I thought the course existed. My answer was, “if we all listed the top ten teachers we ever had, they all had their own unique way of teaching, and yet all were good teachers.” He told me never again to participate in class discussions and never called on me again. I got a D in the Methods course. Fortunately he went on sabbatical and I had a replacement Professor for Practice Teaching. I got an A in Practice Teaching, so this is one of my favorite and interesting memories. It was helped again by luck in that when I showed up to start practice teaching, the teacher in the class told me to wait a week until he finished a unit, and not to come to class since he didn’t want me to feel obligated to copy his own methods. So much in life is luck.
Out in nature we imbibe the vastness of it all, the uniqueness of the various components, the interdependency of all the components, the solace that comes from the quietude, and the peace of mind realizing we are part of it all. I love Arboretums for all the diversity of plants, trees, and bushes. I love the forest for all the wildlife. In my own life, at one point or another, I have had pet (wild or domestic) chickens, pigeons, goats, sheep, rabbits, hamsters, fish, cats, dogs, deer, and horses. There is something rewarding about being able to relate to other living entities in nature. It may seem strange, but one can find talking to animals or even trees a meaningful dialogue. With patience, no dialogue is really needed, just a sense of trust. Of course I can’t do much for a tree, but the tree can do much for me as part of understanding nature and the evolutionary process. There is no logical reason why I could possibly know very much about whatever it is I call God, and I try to be smart enough to not pretend that I could. If God were to look upon all the creations of His evolutionary process I really don’t know on what basis He would favor humans, let along me in particular. A pet is more important to me personally than most other people. Nature is more important and amazing to me than any selected cabal of people.
In the end, it is reward enough to have had the chance to participate, by chance, in this whole amazing process. Of course chance, genetics, and environment have been kinder to a lot of others and also a lot unkinder to a lot of others, but chance has nothing to do with unfairness. Nobody is being picked on via chance. Let’s be honest, we really prefer favoritism tilted in our direction. To be thankful this evolutionary process exists, and so successfully by the laws which govern it, is enough for which to be grateful.
One of the best people to explain nature Was Alexander Von Humboldt (quotes below are by him). He was one of the first to base everything about life as interrelated and controlled by the laws of our cosmos. He saw both the beauty, the interconnectedness of everything in nature, and the amorality of the process in control of evolution. In evolution, progress comes at a cost and those participants in the process who are paying the cost are seen everywhere, and at all times, as the process wends itself forward. Humboldt calls this “the amoral, unforgiving means by which species improve and perpetuate themselves”
“Nature can be so soothing to the tormented mind—a blue sky, the glittering surface of lake water, the green foliage of trees, may be your solace. In such company, it is even possible to forget the reality of one’s personal existence.” In nature we can best gain a sense of freedom and best understand the true nature of our own unique selves. “Isolation has much in its favor. One learns thereby to search inwardly to gain self-respect without being dependent on the opinions of others.” “Nature herself is sublimely eloquent. The stars as they sparkle in the firmament fill us with delight and ecstasy, and yet they all move in orbit marked out with mathematical precision. To truly understand nature, one must feel the ecstasy as well as grasp the mathematics.” And Humboldt said this: “Rather than discover new, isolated facts I preferred linking already known ones together.” Most of us are not going to uncover any “new” facts, but we need make every effort to link the dots.
“All who possess an ordinary degree of mental activity, and delight to create to themselves an inner world of thought, must be penetrated with the sublime image of the infinite when gazing around them on the vast and boundless sea, when involuntarily the glance is attracted to the distant horizon, where air and water blend together, and the stars continually rise and set before the eyes of the mariner. This contemplation of the eternal play of the elements is clouded, like every human joy, by a touch of sadness and of longing”. For me, the sadness is understandable—it is too much all around us—but the longing is nondescript. It is like all of history is converging in an attempt to understand the present and the future. We never feel more alive, or more humbled, than out in nature. We are at home in nature, but the home is so huge, so vast, so incomprehensible in it’s entirety, and so much of it so oft feels unreal.
“The majestic scenes of nature, like the sublime works of poetry and the arts, leave remembrances that are incessantly awakening, and which, through the whole of life, mingle with all our feelings of what is grand and beautiful.” It is even a useful exercise to, on occasion, go out in nature after midnight or at dawn to see nature at sleep or arising for a new day. It is always hard for me to imagine the early explorers forging ahead into land they knew nothing about, never knowing where the next meal might come from or when, or what kind of physical or medical danger might take them down, or what kind of people/animals might be lurking about. I can remember my first time in a redwood forest and how awe struck I was by a world that was so new and breathtaking for me. How much more impressionistic must the world of these early explorers have been to them. I was safe, they had zero personal security. While in one of the South American rain forests it is not uncommon to see rain for four or five months without let-up. Rain is about the only weather which aborts my own little ventures into nature.
Nature is often the only genuine escape from any human ‘rat race’. At the other extreme, walking in city neighborhoods seems the most intense view of human nature. It is overwhelming to ponder that 7.3 billion humans are scurrying around on the earth, and increasing at the rate of 350,000/day.
Strange, but it is to cities where most of the ‘different’ flee, where they can be alone together with everyone else. It is in cities where you find the wealthiest and poorest on the downtown streets, where you find the most physically beautiful and ugliest people, where you find differing cultures warily engaging each other, and where we can individually feel invisible. In numbers there is invisibility. The grand prize question is always “What does all of this really mean”? “Does it really matter what it really means to me personally anyway? Probably no more than I matter to any of the others scurrying around going nowheres and somewheres at the same time. I see the most nattily dressed gentleman walking past the most raggedy dressed beggar on the street, or overhear conversations that are erudite or ungrammatically uncivilized all within earshot. It doesn’t take an awful lot of this to accept the quietude of nature with more reverence. We may not really know where we are going, but nature seems to smugly know the future. Yes, nature is going somewhere, we ourselves are all dead-ended, along for a short ride I guess. Strangely, the other millions of sperm seeking the same egg, were dead-ended after a short race. So much for the sanctity of life. In one sense there is a sanctity of life on this planet but it has nothing to do with any of us. We are just a means to an end, if there is an end.
