Heroes Not Zombies

I noticed these autumn leaves when I was out on a walk recently. What caught my eye was their colour. Look at the variety of shades of brown, yellow and red. Aren’t they beautiful? Together they really capture the idea of autumn, don’t you think?

I love how they have gathered together in this little hollow in the tree. Of course, not a single leaf made it here under its own steam. Each was probably simply blown in the wind. I wonder, did they arrive separately or did they travel together through the air, a tiny handful of individuals lying together on the forest floor, whisked up as a group by a gust, and blown into this hollow?

It makes me wonder about randomness and chance. Nobody looking at these leaves still growing on a tree, could’ve predicted that they would have ended up here. There are just too many factors involved in creating this event, for anyone to calculate and predict. Yet we fool ourselves into thinking that’s possible, don’t we? We think that if all the “relevant data” were collected then we could invent a computer to make exactly this prediction.

It’s not true. We humans are not capable of knowing absolutely everything. So much about Life and the Universe is literally unknowable. Unknowable and unpredictable.

So maybe it’s time we changed direction and stopped pretending we can control Nature and use everything we encounter as a “resource”.

How might we live if we approach the world, not as a resource to be consumed, but as a living planet to be experienced? Each day filled with wonder, each day to be savoured……filled with experiences and events gathered together by forces and circumstances which will never be fully known.