The Grander Scheme of Things
Winter is finally here and it just feels great. Anyone living close by knows that we hardly see any of nature at its glory except during the short climax of winter. People might wonder “why the hell is this nut getting excited about cold weather??” Well, I’ll tell you.
Winter is perhaps one of the biggest things I witness in my life that reminds me that we are part of a much grander scheme in this existence. Our long summers (ok very long…) mean the exact same hot and humid weather every single day and the sky is just plain blue with nothing to show for it. It gets pretty hard to really take a step back from your personal life and once again appreciate the world we live in when this is your daily routine. Winter has arrived late this year and we only saw clouds and rain for maybe one week so far before they took off and just left us with short memories and cold winds. These views and memories really leave me astonished whenever they are here, it’s like watching a beautiful painting all over the sky and it just gets nicer and nicer with every direction you look. The color schemes cannot be described by words and the shapes are just phenomenal. This year we had maybe one day of “heavy rain” so far which lasted maybe 30 minutes… I swear I was looking at it from the window like a 5 year old looking at chocolate (I mean my mouth was literally just open and I almost drooled!). And don’t even get me started on the different ways you can see nature’s beauty. Look at just these three images and just take your time and really sink in the view and notice the differences, really makes you think doesn’t it?
You can just see how opposite things are in just these three images. Hot and Cold, Humid and Dry, Light and Dark. These opposing properties are what make life interesting to me. My definition of life is a series of tests and making decisions. These opposites just add to the mix of it. I cannot feel pain if I cannot contrast it with pleasure, I cannot feel cold if there was no heat, I cannot feel poor if there was no such thing as money and wealth. I think you get the idea.
No matter how much of an idiot I may seem at the moment, maybe this will clarify my point. This feeling that I get when I look at Mother Nature makes me wonder how things got to the way they are today. How are we alive? Why do we look the way we do? Why do we behave like this? Why do we think like this? Now I realize that most of my questions can be answered by using theories of evolution and scientific facts and other stuff, but that really doesn’t answer anything for me. Science, to me, just explains HOW things happened the way they do, it never explains WHY things happen. This in turn makes me look at the simplest of stuff and really notice for the first time how complex life is in crafting every single detail to be exactly right. For instance, I look at my foot and wonder why it’s shaped the way it is… Why do I have an extended part with toes? To keep me balanced when I stand. Why is it facing the front, it could’ve just as easily kept my balance facing the back, right? Wrong, it’s facing the front in relation to how my knee bends. Can you imagine my knee bending the same way it does and my foot is facing the other side? I wouldn’t be able to walk very easily. Why are our legs formed the way they are and not the other way around? Well it had to be one or the other, don’t you agree? Maybe that’s the beauty of life, complex and yet simple at the same time.
Ok I might’ve gotten way too deep with the small details, but I still think it clarifies my point. I had a conversation similar to this with one of my friends and he asked me some questions that I’d never thought I could answer. The one that really got me thinking was: Why do bugs exist? And suddenly without hesitation I answered: “To clean up our mess.” I was surprised of my own answer because I asked myself that very same question not too long ago, call it a coincidence maybe. But just take a minute and think about our relations with the other creatures who we share this world with. Every living creature has a purpose to its existence in some way or another. We breathe in oxygen and let out carbon dioxide because it’s not good for our body. Plants do the exact opposite! If I were facing a plant and all other factors were negligible, we’d both live for eternity breathing off of each other. I take in its leftovers and it does the same for mine. Another example (please excuse the unpleasant imagery), I eat meat from other animals and shit out what my body doesn’t need. End of story right? Nope, it goes in the toilet (well, in the right conditions hopefully), it goes to god knows where… then what? Little cockroaches start feasting on it. And they don’t complain about how I digested the good parts, they just start digging in and removing my leftovers from existence, just how I did with the plant (well, in context maybe). Why do spiders live? I guess they keep all other insects in check; they do eat them after all.
What I’m trying to get to is that all living creatures share this world and we complete each others’ lives. This has been going on for a bazillion years, and this presents the real portrait of nature as I see it.
Speaking of these different creatures, I’m going to stray a bit off topic because I want to focus on the huge varieties in our world. You ever notice that when a person tries to come up with a new creature, we’re always biased because of what we see? In most cases, this new creature will have 2 arms and 2 legs. If we’re trying to get creative, then we add other beings in the mix (body of a horse, eyes of a serpent, horns, wings… etc). It still shows us that we are biased. But just take a look at the variety that we have in the real world… We have 2 legs and 2 arms, so do most other mammals, if not all of them. Other creatures have one head and eight limbs. Others have no limbs at all. Insects have 6 legs in most cases, but then you got ones with 8 and others with 44 fucking legs. Our biases are also shown in our beliefs, for instance, many Muslims claim that no one knows how our creator looks like. Then others claim that Allah creates man with his right hand and destroys man with his left… Apparently someone decided that Allah has 2 hands. Is this really the case? Only Allah knows and no one can argue with that. Anyway, I won’t get into this topic, I’m just trying to prove that the world we live in has an infinite number of variations in creatures and no man gets to decide what comes next.
Now, where are we in all of this? Somewhere along the line, something went horribly wrong. One living creature wanted to be better than the rest, wanted more out of life… We call this creature a human being. Now don’t get me wrong, I love living life as a human (it beats living as a cockroach, I’ll tell you that!) but what has happened to the world we live in today? Over here in Bahrain, I hardly see any “nature” left… Some of the nice views we got here are artificial so they don’t count. Whenever I look at roads, I just think about all the little critters that could be living there building their homes. I’m not saying “Destroy All Roads”, but it really does make me realize that humans were very able to live their life normally without this facility. And it only gets bigger in any way you look at it. Lots of humans form a small society… The attitude of most humans today tells us that societies need to be disciplined, but did you see the movie “The Gods Must Be Crazy”? Before that Cola bottle arrived in their world, they had no such thing as greed. Can you imagine a world without greed? Moving on… Leaders of a society have a huge responsibility. They need to determine how the society lives, how the people are brought up, the conditions in which they function, and most importantly, offer them a life of value. As times passed, people have changed. Leading societies has slowly turned into a game of win or lose. Leaders are failing to see what’s best for their people and are just focusing on their own power struggle, which can be easily lead by greed. This has lead to violence, deaths, wars, bloodshed, and genocide. All for what? Money? Power? For how long? Does it really take a guy to throw a shoe at you to know that you did something wrong? (By the way, I’m not targeting the US with this, I’m just speaking metaphorically, please don’t misunderstand my point). With the way our societies work today, it can get very difficult to get lost in the maze of what we perceive as reality and forget that we are really one small part of the puzzle that is life. I cannot change the way that this world functions no matter how hard I try, but maybe reviving the glory of the earth might show us the errors in our ways. I’d really like to see a leading figure endure the end of days and think how his money and weapons of mass destruction can help him get out of that mess.
Humans usually resort back to some sort of faith for guidance. Irrespective of people being Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Atheists, they all have one common denominator which is that there is one core belief that they live by. A famous behavior in most people today is their failure to see another belief and accept it. This, I believe, is one of the biggest reasons why we don’t have peace in today’s world. Most Muslims see any other religion as their enemy simply because it’s a different faith… When did this happen? Why must I hate someone because of what they chose to believe in? It’s none of my business and I have to respect it no matter what it is! I have met people in the world who are Satanists, believe me they were some of the nicest people I’ve ever spoken to. I shouldn’t force my views on people and there is definitely no reason to put a barrier between me and anyone else if they don’t accept it. That’s just childish and stupid. Is it? Take a look at our world today and decide for yourself… I’ve had friends of mine who studied abroad being called terrorists simply because they’re Arab and Muslim. If these friends of mine ever held a bomb in their hand, they’d probably shit in their pants and have a heart attack first before thinking of blowing up anything.
Final conclusion: I believe in this and you believe in that, it doesn’t matter because in the end we’re all People, and we’re part of a much larger circle of life than what we see everyday. And it is at times like winter when I finally realize all of this and appreciate a world that we can all live in.
Join the Conversation
I thoroughly enjoyed reading your post!
Thanks, I was abit rusty cuz I haven’t written anything in a while. Glad you enjoyed it!
Agreeing with Kawthar, this is a great post! I think we are taking so many aspects of our lives for granted.
I haven’t really asked myself any of these questions for a really long time. But when I was a kid I remember doing so, and all I was told is, “because God made it this way.” And why, I still don’t know!
My father is a huge fan of science and biology, so things like the environment, human body, etc are all topics we discuss often. His job revolves around using natural, organic products and herbs as sources for alternative medecine, something that not too many people/doctors believe in (too bad.) I read some of his books though I understand very little, and it’s really amazing what is out there and what is yet to be explored. I just hope we will not destroy it, as much of it already is.
Anyways, haven’t read a post like this in a while.