Variety

There is a saying that “variety is the spice of life.” So it is but it can be unsettling. Yet if one looks at the natural world, one finds endless variety; variety in colour, size and form; variety of landscape: From desert to flood plain, from mountainside to meadow, from flood to drought, from tropical lushness to arctic wilderness. Even the seasons, though they come around regularly and summer always follows spring, autumn, summer and then winter; yet are two springs exactly the same? What is all this variety telling us? Surely that change is as much a part of life as is breathing. That unless we understand this we are ill prepared for the ups and downs life has in store. We will constantly be blaming fate when things go wrong, or the even tenor of life to which we have become accustomed is disturbed.

Young people have a fairly low boredom threshold and need plenty of variety if they are to enjoy themselves. As we grow older however, routine takes up a bigger and bigger portion of our time. We become creatures of habit; we are resistant to change. If our routine is disturbed unexpectedly, we become irritable and uncomfortable. Our routine is a comfort zone we have developed, maybe so that we don’t have to think too often about uncertainties that may lie in the future? Or maybe so that we can avoid thinking at all! In most of us, the zest for adventure declines with advancing years and so we replace that with routine. We often don’t realise what we have done until someone else points it out to us. The young however are longing for new adventures, they are still experiencing many facets of life for the first time and find it exciting and stimulating; at least most of it.

Much of what happens to us, good and bad, is of our own making. By our thoughts and actions we create the conditions that lead to the event about which we are overjoyed or devastated. There are those who claim even natural disasters such as floods and earthquakes are in some way created by collective thought and action. One can understand this point of view in relation to many floods especially. When we remove natural vegetation to create arable land, when we build concrete roads that cannot absorb water, when we build dwellings on known flood plains; all these things either cause flooding or place human beings in danger that is periodically inevitable. Earthquakes, I am uncertain about, but building dwellings in known earthquake areas will just as inevitably lead to loss of life as building on flood plains. Some people even think that human exploitation of the earth leads to a kind of retaliation by the Earth, so that even earthquakes and hurricanes could be our own fault.

Thinking about such consequences of human folly or sometimes human greed, leads me to the conclusion that to plan our lives, individually or collectively, without giving full consideration to Mother Nature is asking for unnecessary trouble. In our human arrogance, we have assumed ourselves superior to all other forms of life and most refuse even to entertain the idea that the Earth itself is a living organism. They think it is virtually inert and that only what grows and moves on, above and under its surface is living. Small wonder therefore that little more than lip service is paid to matters of conservation. For instance, we know that to continue to destroy the Amazon Rain Forest, the last remaining such area on earth, is the height of folly. Even so, the logging companies bribe and bully their way through the restrictions so as to continue to make a great deal of money whilst laughing at the conservationists, to say nothing of callously ignoring the native peoples they are displacing.

How much of the phenomenon known as Global warming is the consequence of such human stupidity and how much is due to natural, long term change, is difficult to quantify. What is certain is that greed and stupidity on such a grand scale must have some adverse effects and could well be destroying the Earth as a comfortable, God-given home for humanity. The variety, which is such a wonderful stimulant to us as human beings, even though it can be unsettling, is likely to be the chief casualty of all this arrogant foolishness. In its place we may well find an unrelenting sameness of extreme weather in all parts of the globe with human life becoming precarious at best and impossible at worst. It is high time we reigned in our free will and realised that absolute freedom, without consideration for others, especially future generations, is not freedom at all but self-destructive anarchy.