JUNE 4, 2024 – In search of a topic for today’s post, I first scanned the early morning news headlines, but all that came through was, “There is nothing new under the sun.” Then, while comfortably seated on our back porch, I happened to glance up from my cup of java just as a bird made a beeline—er, birdline—from a corner of our garden to a tree in the neighbor’s yard. Easy flight, I thought—relatively speaking. I mean, let’s see a human unaided by any mechanical contraption do that! I then pondered how birds up at the lake fly as fast as the eye can track them—straight into the woods of a million trees and never hit a twig, a branch or a trunk. Such a feat is worth wide acclaim, especially because it occurs not by accident but by grand evolutionary design.
“Isn’t nature wonderful?” as our younger son Byron said at the age of five as he and I hiked down our drive one summer Saturday morning.
Except . . . here’s the thing: so many birds have been flying into (and out of) so many woods for so many eons that the “feat” is as commonplace as all and any of the billions of leaves and needles that make the world green, give off oxygen, and make life (as we know it) possible. Trees and birds flying past them are every bit as unremarkable as they are remarkable.
And so it is with so much else that we see and experience.
I am reminded, for example, of the “bed of nails” theory I once heard in explanation of the Teflon nature of a certain figure of current American culture. The thrust of the theory was that just as a bed bearing a single spike affixed to the center of the bed and sticking straight up isn’t a viable place to sleep, a political candidate mired in a single scandal is rendered “damaged goods”; but a bed of a thousand nails can be tolerated, and sleep, even, can be achieved on a bed of a million nails, just as the fabric of scandal and falsehoods, if thick enough, can be fashioned into a royal robe ensuring that the Emperor will be forever clothed, at least in the sight of true believers.
The theory applies to other major matters—in the realm of climate change, the pattern of extreme weather; a growing compression of record-high temperatures; the weakening of ocean currents; in the case of Putin’s war against Ukraine, we’ve grown inured to the loss of life and property in the two-and-a-half-year war; in Netanyahu’s strategy-vacant war against Hamas, what’s yet another day of suffering by Palestinian children—and anguish of relatives of Israeli hostages? And closer to home, there’s always the lates “mass shooting.” (Yawn.)
Perhaps a certain degree of resignation is a good thing. Maybe a jaded view allows us to move on with the rest of life; to save our wits and energy to pursue good works and keep the rest of things afloat; to influence when we can and not despair when we can’t.
By the time I’d drained my cup of java, the bird flew back—or maybe it was another, I couldn’t be sure. In either case, I was no less amazed than I had been at the outset of my mental wanderings, yet I was equally aware that I shouldn’t be so amazed. What if, for example, the primeval hunter had been struck with paralyzing wonder at the sight of the chickadee’s flight through the woods? Would he have missed the browsing deer that allowed him to feed himself and clan and thus advance his species and link to his descendants—us?
Just then my phone rang. A client calling. Work to do, then for which to bill, collect and spend . . . to feed myself and clan. “There’s nothing new under the sun.”
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
