Over the last 2–3 weeks when confined to the walls of my home, I noticed many things that I have never noticed before or maybe I noticed but never seemed to care enough. The spiders in my room take long hours spinning the web to make its home and living. It does the work with the brilliant delicacy of an expert craftsman and never gives up when the web strands break. It starts over and over again whenever it loses its grip.
For the first time, I understood the pain a tiny spider takes to build its web and it suddenly struck me that this same spider would have done this task over and over again, as we used to clear the webs for cleaning the home every week. So this would have been its nth attempt on the job. I was bewildered by the fact that we humans are not creators with vision, rather we are mere destructors with vision. We destroy to build our life. We destroy for our comforts. That’s what we have always done and that’s what we are going to do forever.
Nature Would’ve Been Healthier And Happier Without Us
With some revelation and a mind with a quest, I just looked outside my window. Nature is peaceful. Animals find their home in it. The squirrels have a family. The cats sit with my mom when she is cleaning. The bees buzz around. The sparrows and mynas make noises to seek attention. They are happy with whatever they have. My prompting mind was still wondering how nature would have looked like without humans. It would have been greener. It would have been much less hot and it would have been much much more beautiful. Of course, it would have been much noisier as there would be a lot of animals speaking with each other. The harmony of co-living would be a treat to watch and enjoy.
But that is just my mind wanting to see naked nature, my mind playing with a wild imagination. Its never going to happen. I can never be the last man standing to witness that event and neither is humanity going to be wiped out with just a virus. We have seen worse. We have had wars, fires, earthquakes, tsunamis and what not. We have seen through deadly flu, viruses, and famines. Every time, humanity was tested. It rose back stronger. But that is where all the problem lies. The genesis of human resilience is where we fail altogether.
Our history shows that whenever we have faced a setback more than the positives of resilience, we played with the negatives of retaliation. We became more greedy. We destroyed a lot more to bring back economic supremacy and geopolitical prominence, and this was not just the case of one nation. It always was a race on to the top. “The more you destroy, the more powerful you will be,” becomes the race motto.
Never do we learn from these small tiny animals around us that nature is not about destroying. Nature does bounce upon us with such challenges. But that is for us to learn from mistakes, to rectify our path. We need to learn that it’s all about sustainability. It’s all about responsibility and affinity to nature. It’s about complimenting and satisfying our needs. It’s about resilience and determination to build on the things we have lost. The collective actions we take are fruiting for us and nature.
Nature is ready to repay for all our losses. The earth can satisfy our needs but not our greed. Corona is a fightback. A fightback which mankind will win eventually because as I said at the beginning, we always have the power to destroy things that are a challenge to us. We have done this 100 times before. So this war with nature is not about survival or to prove who is the fittest, rather it’s a war to show that we as humans have a lot to learn. There is a delicate balance in the world that can’t be conquered with technology and intelligence. That balance is what holds together this beautiful nature and we must maintain that balance. The decisions we make today will decide the results we get tomorrow.
If we forget this simple truth, this is how nature will great just to remind us that after all, we are not as powerful as we think to be. We cannot overpower the natural forces. A tiny microscopic organism from nature’s arsenal was all that it took to bring mighty humans onto its knees.
Just that. A tiny reminder.