Heroes Not Zombies

I happened across this little snail in a tree the other day. It immediately caught my attention and got me thinking.

Look at it…..

Doesn’t it look a perfect fit for that space? Doesn’t it look like it fills the space it’s living in quite completely? Doesn’t it look like it’s adapted well to where it’s found to live?

So what about you?

Hans Georg Gadamer, in his “Enigma of Health”, discusses ideas of health and refers to the concept of “fitness” – but not just the fitness of an athlete – the overall concept of “fitness” – when something is just right, when it just fits well. There is something in that idea which speaks to us of health. When we are in the groove, in the flow, in harmony….when everything falls into place……

What would you say about the fitness of your life? How well do you fit your life? How well does your life fit you?

Then I thought about how this snail seems somehow to be living fully or completely within its niche. And I wonder what you’d say about that?

We all live with certain boundaries, limits, “the hand we have been dealt”, influences from Nature and nurture, from the past and from the future, which set the parameters of our potential lives. Aren’t those parameters immense? Aren’t they almost infinite? But do we stretch ourselves out to fill our available life-space as well as we can? There’s something there about flourishing I think. Not just growing and developing, or being “the best you can be”, but of constantly expanding, flexibly adapting, to manifest ourselves, to express our uniqueness in our own vast life-space.

Adaptation. That’s such a good word. I find some people use it in a negative way as if adapting is about compromise and being less than you could be, but I don’t see it that way. Adaptation is how we grow, how we develop, how we live. Adaptation is how all of Life emerges and flourishes. I think we can get caught up in military and/or capitalist metaphors too much, thinking about the world in terms of competition, territory, power, and aggression. But actually, although all those things do exist, seeing the world that way often goes hand in hand with ignoring the co-operation, collaboration, compassion and kindness which also exists.

And when it comes to adaptation, there’s a lot to be said for negotiating your life-space, rather than killing for it!

If integration can be defined as the creation of mutually beneficial bonds between well differentiated parts, then adaptation becomes a process of a living in a way which maximises the abilities of you and I to explore and inhabit our personal, unique, life-spaces.