Heroes Not Zombies

Why are so many Beatles songs coming into my head these days? Cos, that’s the first thing that happened when I looked at this photo of the trail left by some little creature on the dew covered table in the garden. I don’t know what the little creature was because it had either left or it was invisible! But it sure looks like it took a long and winding road

Although I don’t know what it was that took this winding, seemingly random, constantly changing path, but it immediately strikes me as NORMAL.

Have you ever watched a butterfly in the garden? It flies like this. If you could visualise the trail of its path through the air it would look a lot like a 3D version of the one in this photo.

The hummingbird moth is the same. As it flies from flower to flower on the buddleia bush the path it takes is just as apparently random and chaotic as this.

The Hoopoe running around the garden stopping to drill his long curved beak deep into the soil under the grass takes a path like this.

In every case the path looks chaotic and random. It is utterly unpredictable at every moment.

We humans have developed industrialised ways of living. Industrial management demands consistency and efficiency. We are taught that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, and is, therefore, the best. Industrial work demands that human beings set aside their uniqueness and perform the pre-ordained tasks set by management standards to achieve “the same outcomes” every time.

Mass industrial production favours sameness and promotes brands over creative difference turning street after street and town after town into lookalikes.

There’s a comfort in that industrial approach. It’s familiar. It’s predictable. You can have the same experience in McDonalds in Paris, Tokyo or Moscow as you do in New York.

But the price of all this efficiency and standardisation is a loss of humanity, a devaluing of the unique, singular individual.

And it makes me wonder about the whole concept of efficiency which focuses on predictability, straight, linear lines and processes and sameness.

After all, if evolutionary theory is right, all these creatures would have developed systematised, predictable, standardised ways of behaving instead of these apparently chaotic, squiggly, random ones, wouldn’t they?

Looking at it from this perspective isn’t Nature showing us the evolutionary advantage of randomness, irregularity, and unique difference?

I think it is.

Here’s another aspect of that little trail – it kind of looks lost doesn’t it? Either it’s the trail of an explorer, turning this way and that, following instinct and whim, moment by moment, millimetre by millimetre. Or it’s a wanderer, ambling around, stumbling across this and that.

Isn’t that appealing?

Wouldn’t you prefer to be an explorer and a wanderer to being a standardised cog in somebody else’s machine?

Wouldn’t you prefer to make your own unique, singular path through this life, than follow the straight, linear, programmed, standardised one?

It’s worth thinking about.