Order and chaos

I worked on a little harbour island once. It was a mess, it needed a gardener’s touch. It was a chaos of weeds and grass and when I planted out new trees I wondered whether they stood a chance of surviving. A friend of mine has small children, they seem wild and out of control sometimes, and they remind me of those trees. Parents have to make decisions about how much freedom they give, how many rules to impose – they face the meaning of altruism every day I reckon. A child screams for attention and the parent comes to the rescue, using altruism to help them make the best decision for the child as well as their own sanity. Altruism is the reference point, especially when parents have to draw a line between indulging the child and denying them. When bringing order to chaos, we need to know why we do what we do. Take a weed for instance. Is it a weed because it’s an unwanted plant? When pulling out weeds to make room for a sapling, we consider the greater good and yet we also want to avoid destruction. It’s a dilemma and a challenge. Our decision might not resolve everything to our perfect satisfaction, but then relative altruism is really all about compromise.
It isn’t about the ideal, it’s simply about doing a job that needs to be done, urgently and thoroughly. Perhaps it involves nothing more than smiling when we don’t feel like smiling or saving animals’ lives by eating plant-based foods, but it might be no less than a rescue bid for both planet and human nature. If we can restructure our own habits, recognise strangers, respect the sovereignty of an animal, act as a true guardian to children, just by readjusting a few of our attitudes we’ll surely be helping to re-balance the earth. And if that’s obvious, why are we waiting?