All life is repetitive.  Repetitive forms, repetitive behaviors.  It isn’t strictly repetitive, for Nature loves surprises.  But you won’t find fiddleheads popping out of the ground in December.  Springtime calls them back to stage, always with that same quiet mathematical elegance.  Of course, the human species is no exception.  For all our cultural diversity, technical prowess, and uniqueness as a species, we tend to reinforce the rule rather than break it–despite the imagination to do so.  If the imagination is our most distinctly human faculty (let’s just say for the moment), why we do not make more use of it?  As insistent as the fiddlehead, it seems that we like to do things, for lack of better reason, because we’ve done them before.  It is bewildering to find no grounds for our choices.

So it is said, “We have much to learn.”  What do we mean when we say this?  Consider how radical a break this represents between our species and every other kind of animal.  Do dogs sit around and wonder how much their species has yet to learn?  I’m sure that if a single cat ever mulled over the idea, “I’m not doing enough with my life!” its entire species would vanish with the inanity of the thought.  And while I’ve always wondered what Emperor Penguins talk about during a huddle, I’m sure it’s not, “What are we doing?  This is crazy.  Maybe we should consider a change.”  Other animals might have to adapt to changing circumstances (most likely brought on by humans), but their adaptation is habitual and simple.  Do or die.  We perform the same adaption to environmental demands, for example, when natural disasters strike.  People pool their resources and share them unflinchingly, naturally.  When somebody says “we have much to learn” it is often as a wish that we had more to laugh about, less to lament, a wish that the species would get out of its own (and the rest of the world’s) way.

I’ve heard it said that “there is nothing unnatural in this world.”  I’ve said it myself many times.  I love the idea; but oh how we put it to the test!  Besides humans, is it in any animal’s nature to “get in its own way”?  It is a very strange thought, painting our kind very strangely.  As far as I can tell, the rest of life on Earth has no problem with this. Either an adaptational need will be seen and performed, or it will be overlooked.  Humans are radicals, natural born revolutionaries.   We believe we are all unique, paradoxically; and we are right: other animals know and never veer from their natures.  Human nature, we might say, is yet undecided.  Being left undecided, however, does not make the subject mute or forgotten.  If human nature is open rather than fixed, can it veer from itself?  To say we veer from our nature would mean we veer from what is held, or should be held, as highest in our nature.   It would mean we have faltered in our becoming somehow, in either the direction of the future or in the direction of the past.  There are, then, two questions.  Do we like what we are becoming?  And, Have we mistakenly discarded what is useful from the past?