Heroes Not Zombies

One of the most striking characteristics of any natural environment is diversity.

Diversity of species, diversity of colour, of form and size.

If you think two plants are identical, you’re not looking well enough.

Every single living organism is born into, matures in, and dies in, a unique time and space, a unique environment in which it experiences an life which has never been lived before, and which will never be repeated in its details.

You might find that hard to swallow when you are thinking about flowers, but I bet you don’t find it so difficult when you think about yourself, your parents, your siblings, your children, your friends and colleagues. Do you?

And yet, we live in societies which seem determined to flatten out, or ignore our differences. We are reduced to averages, to mere examples of a “mass”, to statistics. Yet in the lives we are actually living we don’t find these so-called averages. Nobody quite fits that mould. We are not elements of a mass, but unique creatures living together. Life can’t be reduced to what can be measured, to mere statistics. We lose something essentially human when fail to see what’s unique.

It seems there’s another power at work too – conformity. The social, economic and physical pressures to be the same…to consume the same products, to produce the same products, to have the same desires, wishes and opinions. There’s a terrible reductionism in the world, the worst of which are the binary ones – the ones which reduce life to “either/or” to “us/them” to “good/bad” to “citizens/foreigners”….you can find your own ones all around you, dividing the world into two groups on the basis of race, gender, belief, sexuality, nationality.

When I get overwhelmed by the stories of “the rise of the populists”, of xenophobia, prejudice and cruelty, I find it re-balancing to walk slowly in the plant world and remind myself how reality is based on uniqueness, how Life thrives on diversity. Then to bring those principles and values back into my everyday life.