Category: nature

Love me some shower time… something very meditative about it.  I always seem to come up with interesting thoughts.  Just got out of the shower, and I was thinking about how equal opportunity and equal outcome present themselves in nature.  Consider this:

In a forest of trees, some trees are taller than others.  The tallest of the trees tend to absorb the most sun, allowing them to grow taller still.  The shadows which these trees cast on those around them often prevent others from becoming as tall.  Some trees won’t survive their first few years.  Others are planted and never grow at all.

Should we be upset at the tallest of trees for absorbing all that sunlight while casting shadows over others?  Should we be upset with nature for creating an environment where such inequality exists?  Is the forest that we really want, one in which all trees grow to the same size?

When I look at a forest, I don’t look at what should be, I see a remarkably complex and eloquent example of what is.  When you find that tallest tree and ask why that tree is so tall, you’ll see what I mean.  Maybe that tree had good genetics.  Maybe it was planted in just the right spot.  Maybe it was planted in a terrible spot, but a neighboring tree fell down and a terrible spot became a great spot.  Maybe someone saw it slouching over when it was younger and helped it out.  Maybe the logging company decided they’d go elsewhere.  Either way, it did the only thing that trees know how to do.  It planted roots, stretched towards the sunlight, and grew.

This is how nature operates.  It does so without any sense of right and wrong or fair and unfair.  Nature is uninterested in a forest of trees which all grow the same for the sake of equality.  Why is that?  Perhaps nature has an appreciation for the shade which we have yet to grasp.  Perhaps it’s the shade that forces us to evolve.  A tree with good tree genetics, which is given all the sunlight it needs, will only ever be a tree.  It’s the tree which grows in the shade which is forced to find new ways of being a tree.