Have you ever watched a nature program on television or over the internet that showed in intricate, minute detail all that goes into one aspect of an organism’s existence, which left you gobsmacked? Like certain birds who migrate at a certain time of the year to a certain spot on the globe because dust storms from one continent blow over the ocean to this place and leave tiny organisms that land in the waters and grow into the food these birds eat? Something so specific and interconnecting and amazing as that?
Likely, you have seen such a program many times, and many times remarked on how incredible Nature is. How coordinated, how planned, and how fragile the ecosystem appears to be. Meanwhile, to the bird, it’s just flying to where the food is and eating. To the plankton or bacteria, whatever the food source is, it’s not a food source. It’s a culture of living beings and this is how they are born and the life they are born into. They don’t care about what this all looks like in slow motion. They don’t need decades of monitoring and study to exist. They simply exist; simply are. And so are we when we stop being mesmerized by our ability to observe micro and macro levels of existence.
It is all amazing, all of this life we’re surrounded by, embedded in, and are. But the exuberance we feel when we see all of the details of the hows and whys of our existence comes the moment we realize how much of life we have taken for granted. We were unaware of the details, living dull, secondhand lives, and now we see them and fall in love with life again, if only for the length of the program. This is its own nature show.
How does one species, bird, for example, remain blissfully unaware—truly alive in the moment—to the extent that the mechanics behind the whats, whys and hows of life are irrelevant, not even on the radar of an issue to take note of, while another species, human, feels like its job is to learn everything?
It’s not that birds don’t know things. They do. It’s not that they don’t feel. They do. They are not robots. But how are they living differently than we? They are living in the flow of the moment. Living for the sake of living. They are “birding.” That is, expressing bird, their specific family and genus of bird, and their own individual sense of being bird.
Birds are not robots and we are not repositories of knowledge. We’re not living, breathing Google Search engines. But do we know that?
We don’t live in the moment. We take the moment and drag it into time, just like the slow-motion nature footage we admire. We examine every detail because we can and because we are not living, not truly, and so we are dulled. As dull beings keeping ourselves trapped in time, we feel alive vicariously. We feel alive through reminders of just how awesome all of this living process is. We need to be slapped in the face by peak experiences that shake us from our stupor, if only for a moment. The irony is, if you were truly alive in the moment, all of those details would be superfluous. They wouldn’t be boring; you would have no feeling about them one way or another. They would be happening, You would be happening.
All is one happening and when we’re not dulled to happening we are alive in the joy of happening. When we are dulled, as we are now, we need constant reaffirmations that there is a joy to this aliveness somewhere, if only fleetingly, if only in the appearance of intricate design as exampled in the lives of other animals.
Beauty is indivisible. If we were undivided inside we would not need to gawk at “beautiful things” to reacquire our sense of beauty. We would not need to forever learn what and how and why we are as a means of tickling our appreciation for life. Life would not be an onscreen object.
The interconnecting nature of Nature is intricate in its macro view, yet none of the parts playing their part feel complicated. They simply live even when they don’t live simply. We Westernized humans do not simply live, even if we live simply. We are in time and out of touch. This out-of-touch-ness we call evolution. The aliveness we feel to block out our dullness we call learning.
Our inventiveness is a defense mechanism that keeps us asleep while reminding us that we are. And our ability for causing a grand stir inwardly about what we’re seeing outwardly is a poor substitute for who we truly are when awake.