You are an Organism

Today was the first day I really noticed longer days. Today was the first day I felt a deep energy of growth. Today was the first day I was confident that spring is here. Wild animals knows this without having to check an app or watch the weather. Trees know when to start setting our buds. Birds know when to migrate. Mammals know when to crawl out of their hole and get some of that warm sun for the first time in months. Somehow, we don’t know this anymore.

Watching nature and paying attention to its patterns can inform just as accurately as out technology, but like learning a new language you need to know a few words before you can put together sentences. Something about the certainty of hard science gives the rational part of our being comfort. Comfort in knowing the experts have done all that they could to inform us. Watching nature and paying attention to patterns isn’t peer reviewed in an academic sense. It’s peer review anecdotally on an inter-species scale. The culmination of a billion points of data reduced slowly to a feeling of something as simple as “spring is here” or “rain is coming”. On some scale, humans still have some of these rudimentary senses. The rational being in me always thought it was interesting that shopping centers are more busy on a nice warm sunny Saturday than a cold rainy one. “Don’t they want to be inside and shop on a shitty day”. No they want to be inside on a shitty day and “go out” on a nice day. In this instance, and in this culture, going out, really just means going inside somewhere else.

Don’t read this wrong. This isn’t some soap box to tell people to go out and connect with nature for a more fulfilling life. Learning the process of connection is worth more than the fruit of the connection. Unless a hobby or career of yours relies on interacting with nature, knowing that spring is here early doesn’t really benefit your life at all, however, the process of being attentive and learning to recognize these patterns benefits everything. Being able to intuitively analyze a myriad of data points and draw a conclusion is one of the greatest human skills and (now for the soap box) it is slipping away. Attention is easy to give uselessly. So if you’ve made it this far, don’t keep scrolling, go find some way to use this power for betterment, to improve your lot or the lot of other, to move the needle. Remember your natural power of being part of life on earth to make life on earth better, by just a little bit, but only if you notice it’s the right day for it.