A Return to Essence

Let’s examine a tree together. It has long wooden branches and lush green leaves. It stands rigid and tall, mastering the art of silence as bugs, squirrels and hawks gnaw its frame, building homes, jumping branch to branch until its thin ends split to the ground. Plant cells divide, absolve, share molecules and signals, deciding when the tree will lose its leaves and when it is time to produce pollen. On one side of the globe, it is called palm, another the redwood, the pine, the sycamore. It is natural, heroic, beautiful. It is a tree.

Would you say that since there are so many trees, the one you see in the distance does not matter? Would you say that the tree is not worthy of existing since it offers no novelty, that it is pointless because there have been millions of the same across time? Would you think it had no value here? Would you ever ask yourself what the point of a tree was?

The tree of course is not here to persuade you of its value. It simply became and exists, in no other state than exactly what it was designed to do. It will fulfill its life as a tree and die the same uneventful death as trees do. Expending all of its energy into its natural state. Nothing less and nothing more.

This rich essentialism exists throughout nature. A bird is a bird, lives exactly that, and dies one. It is not on an ambitious pursuit to become the Elvis of birds, designing the next big app, attempting the highest altitude in all of bird history. A bee, a flower, a bacterial cell, the chipmunk, the fungi on the bark, a sea of krill, a butterfly, a dolphin; every crevice of nature practices a full-hearted essence of what they are. The entity of their life is confined within the box that nature predisposed them to be.

Why then, is it man’s destiny alone, to seek a meaning that clashes with its natural state? Why is man, on a billion-year-old planet, defying all things essentialism, defining complacent existence as mediocre and shameful, and completely uprooting the very groundwork nature intended?

Why is he so different and why does he so adamantly tell himself so?

A man today would say that his life was meaningless if it looked the same and ended the very silent decay as a man of the 10th century. A man would say yes, there are too many of me. A man would think a life to be lesser than if it was poorer or weaker compared to the strength and popularity of his neighbor’s. A man would shudder if you told him his life would amount to nothing greater, that in all of his existence despite lengthy equations, artificial intelligence, dissertations and spaceships that he would indefinitely end in the exact state that which he began; human.

Its a lot of wasted energy for the pursuit of an impossible goal. What would man’s life look like if he cared about the interior of his genetic box, if he dropped his tools with slumped shoulders and became a man? What if he instead surrendered his omnipotent title to do what every other organism practiced; living its defined life and never aching of more. What would such a life look like? What type of humanity would we exist in today?

What if the expansion of consciousness was an inverse move, a faulty misstep down a long flight of stairs? One must ask themselves to what extent our advanced technology has improved our lives if the consequential aftermath is an exponential increase in more things to fix, to explain, to vex upon. Man must make a law, a gadget, a class system, a medical field dedicated to treating and labeling such things. He must organize jobs and work from home schedules, adding content to intangible forms, communicating in numerous ways beyond the human voice. He ruins himself in nuclear bombs, warfare, an elaborate panel of emotions and religions, paradigms and lectures. And he brings all other beings into this spiral with him, progressing global warming, the destruction of rain forests, the population shortages of ecosystems with the redefinition of natural circumstances. And yet he is always at the ready to call any new discovery made as other an “advancement.” And it is on this journey that we find ourselves with the issues of today, confining our limits to familiar epochs, when man’s overruling hierarchy has plagued the planet for hundreds of thousands of years.

And still; a tree is not at risk of suicide. Man is.

A tree is not plagued with discovering who he really is. Man is.

A tree is not at risk of destroying himself. Man is.

A tree does not question the efficacy of life. Man does.

All of these diversions towards existentialism, the thick nihilistic umbrella that looms over us, may not be an “advancement” in wisdom as we claim it has. The 20th century minds that have brought us to evaluate our search for meaning can quite literally be found in book titles such as Victor Frankl’s own dissection, in Fredrich Nietzsche’s call to action and Kierkegaard’s push for the manmade definition. The preaching of essence that Plato and Socrates envisioned so highly, that all things carried an “essence” or defined purpose before birth, has been deteriorating into the existentialism of our time. As we move towards an abundant future filled with man’s selfish reflection, we lose his core understanding of his initial being.

Henry Thoreau of the late 1800s saw these limitations and began to evaluate them through transcendentalism. He gathered his reflections at Walden Pond, a peaceful spot in Concord, Massachusetts. In 1845 he went to live alone in the woods for two years, collecting his thoughts and piecing together his first book. He was a passionate naturalist, urging the voices of his time to consider the implications of technology on the land. He once wrote in his journal, “nature is worth more even by our modes of valuation than our improvements are.” Thoreau called out the “arbitrary attachments” man has made of things, deeming one thing valuable over the other, encouraging students to find their highest potential in “the primitive vigor of Nature in us.”

As we move forward in the 21st century with the fragility of nature in our worldview, with the consistent evaporation of glaciers, coral reefs, and community empathy, it is in Thoreau’s mentorship of isolation and simplicity that redemption may exist. Understanding that these insights exist beyond the YouTube thumbnail of “being boring,” or living a life outside the remnants of vacant career ladders and material gains, but a solution to a cascading problem we have created and must take accountability for. Condensing ourselves back into nature, putting away the Russian dolls we so fervently love to expand, and ceasing our hands from the endless entropy we expel can save our world. Reinvigorating a connection to the fellow organisms we share this home with, embracing such uniformity and all of its generic limitations that it holds, unabashedly calling ourselves man, not God, not other, and existing in its defined scopes until we too die an unnoteworthy death only to be born again in complacent cycles. Generic, dull, at the whims of how we were created.

A miraclous feat nonetheless.