TANNER: No, a thousand times no: hot water is the revolutionist’s element. You clean men as you clean milkpails, by scalding them.
ANN: Cold water has its uses too. It’s healthy.
TANNER: [despairingly] Oh, you are witty: at the supreme moment the Life Force endows you with every quality. Well, I too can be a hypocrite. Your father’s will appointed me your guardian, not your suitor. I shall be faithful to my trust.
ANN: [low siren tones] He asked me who would I have as my guardian before he made that will. I chose you!
TANNER: The will is yours then! The trap was laid from the beginning.
ANN: [concentrating all her magic] From the beginning— from our childhood—for both of us—by the Life Force.
George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
Two weeks ago, in the final throes of the Summer that Humptulips County didn’t have, I sat outside, alone, on our back patio admiring the flower garden Helen has planted there. As the heat drained from the day and the evening descended into twilight, I enjoyed their color, their graceful dance in the light breeze, and their perfume. In the moments prior to my return indoors, I was struck by the inherent contradiction of flowers: the fragile beauty inherent in their wispy petals and wondrously pliant stems when compared to the strength of the mysterious force that impels them, annually, to be and to bloom.
Upon further reflection, it strikes me that all life is similar to that manifested so elegantly by flowers: fragile, in the inability of an individual living thing to stand up for long to a determined adversary intent upon its destruction or to an immovable object placed unluckily in its path; collectively strong and determined in each species’ will to survive, such that the death of one, single life will not doom the species. Indeed, the death of an entire species cannot prevent the life force, itself, from continuing to manifest itself in its myriad, mysterious ways. For each living thing – each flower, each person, each life, each filum – is nothing more than a temporary medium by which the life force moves just that much further toward whatever goal it may seek.
I first realized this truth watching my youngest son, who was born almost three months prematurely, in his incubator struggling for the life that he so obviously demanded and, eventually, claimed.
Peter will be be 29 this year and no longer fits into the palm of my hand as he did at birth. It was two weeks into his two month stay in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit of the University of Washington Hospital that we were told that “he might live”. For two months, we could only watch his survival struggle and encourage him by touch and voice and give him whatever support our twice daily visits had to offer. In the end, he survived only because he was determined to do so; he survived because that tiny fragment of the life force which dwells peculiarly within him was too strong to be denied by the forces then arrayed against it.
The life force persists in total ignorance of the many, heated arguments about why it exists, who or what created it, or what its destiny might be. It has no independent obligation to understand itself or its destiny. Its sole obligation is to persevere, a task at which it is supremely capable and competent. The tools it wields are a wholly mysterious ability to quicken matter coupled with an indomitable will – a will to be or, perhaps, a will to become.
Fascination with the life force stems from this last discrepancy. Is the struggle for survival an end unto itself, or is there a destination to which the life force is slowly meandering? And, if the latter, what role does each form of life play in its grand design and why must some species consume others in order to participate and survive?
Humanity has been intently focused on this conundrum throughout its entire existence. For much of its presence upon earth, humanity’s fascination with this issue has been entirely self-absorbed and human-centric and has created at least as much ill (some in the form of true evil) as it has good. Humanity spends far too much of its time thundering about whose God is bigger, stronger, more powerful, or speaks a more correct or pure “Truth”. In humanity’s pursuit of an answer to the meaning of life, it has created far more demons than Samaritans, far more belligerence than understanding, and far more death by means of war and mutual hostility than is good for the continuation of any species. In short, humanity is, seemingly, far from being the ideal vessel by which the life force can move onward.
And, yet, it too survives – at least for the moment and perhaps for the future if it, as a species, can remain clever, inventive and adaptive.
In comparison to humanity’s incessant thunder and lightning, I much prefer the survival methodology of flowers: the furthering of whatever goals the life force seeks by a periodic display of beauty seemingly intended as the leavening in the temporary struggle of each individual to survive.
As a species, humanity has much to learn from its fellow travelers (whether sentient in ways we comprehend or otherwise) on the life force’s meandering path – and the very first thing many of us ought to learn is that we have all sorts of fellow travelers from which to seek inspiration.
