Nature versus Technology – Mindfulness, Acceptance, Peace

There is a deep-rooted idea that human life is separate to nature. It is an idea that’s become popular in many modern ways of thinking. Human Beings left the savannah and jungles long ago. The sweep of time has brought many transitions, from hunting to farming to industrialization. Now, our lived experiences are primarily in cities. The above idea holds that cities are unnatural. That human lives have become all too enhanced by technology. Namely, that we live somehow outside of nature.

People often talk about getting out to the countryside, to enjoy nature. Or going travelling on career breaks. Obviously, these activities have many mental and emotional benefits. There’s no disputing the value of escaping one’s everyday worries and woes. Yet we should talk about how much acceptance there is of struggle in nature. The natural order is a cycle that is filled with hardship and death. If we only saw ourselves as less separate to the natural order, then we would come to be more at peace with our troubles.

Visiting a Zoo

Two things struck me on a recent visit to a zoo in the NorthWest of England. One was that the Painted Dogs look so healthy, lively and free-spirited in captivity. They always look mangey and half-starved in nature programs.

I assume this is because in the wild they are not the main hunters of prey. They sneak in to finish off the remains of what the bigger predators don’t want. By the same token, the Lions looked bored and depressed. Not having to chase and takedown large herd animals. Instead just having huge chunks of meat tossed to them on a daily basis.

The herd animals just operated as though they were in a herd, albeit with limited space to graze. I started to think what happens to them at the end of their life. Presumably, there is a moment when each zebra or antelope takes its final breath. It keels over, and a gang of enthusiastic zookeepers will scurry over. They then whisk the body away to the animal morgue where it is disposed of.

In the wild, antelopes don’t get to that stage where they just lie down and die of old age. The herd is always on the move. To find food. To find shelter and to avoid being hunted. The fate of each and every antelope is to grow old and not be able to keep up with their herd. The old are the ones who are taken off by the predators as easy pickings.

The Struggle

As human beings, if we are wise enough, early on in life, we can provide for our own old age and/or we can rely on family connections to help us as we grow older. Failing that, there are societal institutions which will nurse, monitor and attempt to prolong our life through their established infrastructures. Not so in nature.

Luckily, the herd animals can’t conceive of their fate. If they could they would know that not only are their days numbered, but a grizzly end in the maws of a predator that has evolved to catch them, kill them and eat them is almost certain. The predators for their part must compete for prey, and if they are unsuccessful, they will starve.

This picture of the natural order is fairly bleak as it involves such hardship and death. I would say it is more realistic than the sanitized view that nature programs present, where happy animals bound about, with isolated incidents of successful kills.

In reality, all the animals struggle, but they do not know that they are struggling. What they do know is that like us, from when they are born, they are obliged to survive until the end of their lives. This we have in common. This is natural.

The False Separation

All of the novelties and excitements that we have in contemporary society, the online world, the screens, the bright lights of big cities, the photos/media of just about everything, divide us and distract us from certain inalienable truths. Without wishing to suggest I know what those are, I would say my point here is that we don’t have or own our individual lives, instead we are life.

As we came from nature, so we will return to nature; it doesn’t matter if in the between of our coming from and the eventual going back we make decisions, walk a particular path and end up somewhere for better or worse. If we can remember to accept the struggle as if we are still in nature, we will thrive.

I believe this because I think the human-nature disconnect is an unhelpful illusion, a product of supposedly useful but actually flawed abstraction. We each need to rewind where possible, to forget the separation. If we can do this, whilst we remember our roots and practice living life with kindness, we will have peace.