Reports From The Nursery (Part Thirty-Two)

By Alexis, In Her Own Words

It’s been pretty exciting around here for the past few weeks. It seems like every day has involved massive deluges of water from on high, usually accompanied by impressive fireworks shows and often in partnership with cyclone-level tempests roaring past my windows.

            I’m always impressed by Nature’s shows of force. Even at my tender age —I’ve mentioned that I’m three now, haven’t I?— the sheer power on display during a severe storm is a reminder of how large Weather is, and how small all of us mere humans are. The random aspect of weather testifies to the truth that there are elements of life that are completely beyond our own feeble control.

            There is a undeniable fact about nature: for all its apparent chaos, it seems to spend an enormous amount of time trying to keep the world from getting completely out of hand.

            A thunderstorm tears across the sky, trees bend, sheets of rain plunge groundward as though Someone upstairs has ripped the bottom from some cosmic swimming pool… and yet, eventually, the storms move on. The sun returns. All too quickly, the puddles disappear. Birds emerge from wherever they take shelter to resume their business. Nearby, a squirrel scratches its head as it tries desperately to remember where it buried a cache of acorns— and, failing, begins the search for a replacement supply.

            Nature seems to forever be lurching out of balance. And then, one way or another, it resumes clawing its way back to balance.

            We see this— in weather, in the critters populating all of Creation, in the renewal of fire-ravaged forests, in the rhythms of the seasons, in the endless competition among all living things.

            Too much rain? Nature inevitably gives way to drought. Too many deer? Nature culls the herd by mandating a shortage of food. Too much vegetation? In short order, the plentiful feast draws a throng of more herbivores (which attracts more hungry predators). The whole arrangement resembles a vast dinner party at which everybody is eating, nobody knows exactly who invited whom, and somehow the catering budget keeps getting adjusted by Unseen Hands.

            Nature rarely sits still. It does not achieve some perfect, permanent state of balance and then settles back with a muttered, “Finished.”

            Instead, it is constantly searching for… equilibrium.

            And perhaps not by accident, human beings are ceaselessly doing exactly the same thing.

            Anyone who has lived through the summer knows that Nature has a somewhat eccentric understanding of moderation. One week can be pleasantly warm, the next hot enough to make you question whether your ancestors made a serious mistake when they settled on this particular planet.

            Then comes rain.

            And all too often, it is not the gentle, cinematic rain that falls while someone plays a piano in the background. No. Nature frequently delivers rain with the enthusiasm of a toddler who has just discovered the garden hose.

            But even the wildest weather eventually begins to correct itself. Heat creates rising air, clouds form, storms develop, rain falls, and conditions change. One extreme helps produce the conditions that push things in another direction.

            It is not always comfortable, but it is remarkably persistent. And in its own way, it is exceptionally balanced. Nature seems to have a built-in suspicion of extremes.

            Populations demonstrate the same principle. Suppose a certain animal becomes unusually successful. Food is plentiful, predators are scarce, and the animals reproduce with the confidence of people who have just won the lottery, or worse.

            Willy-nilly, now there are more animals.

            More animals require more food. Food becomes scarcer. Competition increases. Some animals go hungry. Reproduction slows. The population falls. Eventually there is more food available for the survivors, and the population can begin to recover.

            Nature has no central committee meeting, no conference room to discuss this.

There is no Department of Deer Population Management, no PowerPoint presentation titled Strategic Initiatives for Sustainable Rabbit Expansion (unless you count the National Rifle Association).

            Instead, the balance comes through countless individual conditions. Something becomes abundant, which encourages more of something else. That abundance explodes the next level of the Food Pyramid, ultimately creating a shortage. The shortage changes behavior. The altered behavior starts the swing in the other direction again.

            You have to admire Whoever designed the system. It is a continuing, virtually automatic interaction between abundance and scarcity.

            Forests work much the same way. A forest is not merely a collection of trees. It is an ongoing negotiation among trees, insects, birds, animals, fungi, water, sunlight, soil, wind and time. Mankind can tinker with this balance —creating, say, national parks or apartment-cum-shopping mall developments— but the system tends to shrug off merely human efforts to influence Nature’s intricate clockwork.

            Nonetheless, it’s important to remember that Nature is not trying to make everybody happy. It is trying to keep the whole thing going, regardless.

            That distinction matters.

            We humans tend to confuse equilibrium with comfort. We think balance means that everything should be pleasant, predictable and approximately 72 degrees (higher in winter months, of course).

            Nature just chuckles, having different priorities.

            A forest can burn and eventually renew itself. A river can flood and reshape its banks. The population can decline and later recover. A season can be brutally hot, followed by a season that sparks complaints about being cold.

            Balance, in nature, does not mean the absence of discomfort. Rather, it means the ability to respond to disruption. Like a pendulum, it swings between extremes, only early hitting what humans might term the Sweet Spot.

            Oddly, there is something profoundly reassuring about that, or should be.

            Because our own lives rarely achieve equilibrium by simply remaining still.

            In fact, the harder we try to keep everything perfectly steady, the more absurd the enterprise becomes. We want the right amount of work, but not too much. We want enough social interaction to avoid feeling like a hermit, but not so much that we start faking a minor illness as an excuse to stay home. We want adventure, but preferably with parking and maybe a nice Holiday Inn nearby.

            After all, we want a good night's sleep, which is apparently the one thing modern civilization has not yet figured out how to manufacture in bulk.

            Human beings are equilibrium-seeking species. We instinctively know when something is becoming too much. When we spend too much time alone, we can find ourselves talking to the dog, who may be an excellent listener but clearly is a poor conversationalist.

            Humans seek balance because some primitive instinct within us retains a  knowledge that Nature has always understood: extremes tend to correct themselves—or force us to correct them.

            I guess that the trick, of course, is to recognize the extreme before it becomes a crisis.

            Nature sometimes has an advantage over us here. Nature does not spend three business quarters insisting that it can maintain an unsustainable situation through sheer optimism.  A lake does not say, “I know we're running low on water, but let's revisit this next quarter.”

            People tend to procrastinate and are wonderfully stubborn about doing it.

            Yet our bodies themselves constantly remind us that equilibrium is essential. We eat when we're hungry, drink when we're thirsty. We sleep when we're tired. We become restless when we sit too long. We shiver when we're cold and sweat when we're hot.

            The body is forever making small adjustments. Wisely, it does not demand perfection. Instead, it encourages ongoing corrections.

            That may be the deeper lesson. A balanced life is not an existence in which everything is balanced all the time. That would be impossible. It likely would also be dreadfully boring. A balanced life may simply be one in which we finally notice that we have drifted too far in one direction—and are willing to move back.

            Nature does this constantly. After winter comes spring; after spring, summer. Then autumn and winter and— but you get the picture, of course.  There is no season in which Nature announces, “This is going so well that we should probably just stay here forever.”

Imagine an endless summer. At first, pretty sweet. After a few months more, it’s perhaps only pleasant. But eventually, you find yourself standing in your backyard at 2 p.m., sweating through your clothes, staring at a lush tomato plant and whispering, “I would give anything for a snowstorm.”

            That is the necessity of change. Even the things we love become oppressive… if they never end. Life thrives somewhere between the extremes.

            Which is why equilibrium is so difficult. It is not a destination. It is a moving target.

            We, and everything around ourselves, are constantly adjusting. The world changes. Our circumstances change. Our priorities change. Our bodies change. Our relationships change. The things we thought mattered enormously in youth seem rather silly at thirty, let alone seventy. Amazingly, some things we dismissed when we were young suddenly became precious. We spend our lives recalibrating, constantly.

            There is a certain comfort in recognizing this. Humans often judge us because we cannot seem to “get everything together.”

            But few folk, if any, get everything together.

            “Change” is the only true constant in life.  Life does not demand that every species, nor every individual, flourish equally.  Life allows change to alter the arrangement; it does not regard a temporary disruption as proof that the entire system has failed.

            There is comfort, as well as wisdom, in that.

            Life will knock things out of balance. It will do so repeatedly and without consulting your calendar. Occasionally, it means sitting quietly on the porch, looking at the trees, and admitting that the trees appear to have a much better grasp of the situation than we do.

            You see, Nature has been practicing this for a very long time. We would do well to watch and learn.

            The weather will change. Populations will rise and fall. Forests will grow and decay. Rivers will wander. Seasons will turn. Storms and lightning, squalls and gales will blow.

            And tomorrow morning, or maybe the next day, the sun will peek through. Which may be Nature's way of saying that the universe is still working on it.

            We probably should be, too.

- end -

            (EDITOR’S NOTE: Storms come and go— but Alexis will always be here, pondering life. She’ll return soon with more.)