Becoming Nature
I first pieced together a part of this on Dec 21st, 2024 at a café in Seoul, around the beginning of winter, and at the time, I called it a “working theory“.
Since then, I’ve come to find that this is no longer just a theory but a fundamental truth of life — from the tropical savanna, to the cold polar, to the ocean, to the jungle, to the cosmos, to the human body, to food, to craft, to business.
And it’s been quite a breeze, lately, designing my life in a way where virtually nothing feels like a waste of time or a chore — where everything has function — and because of this, I continue to feel an ever-growing, unprecedented level of clarity — in my work, my health, and my perception of all things natural and societal.
Let me distill, briefly, what I see.
Nature, in effect and through integration, ends up a perfect system, largely in a roundabout fashion.
Take a forest. A bee seeks and drinks nectar from a flower that it unintentionally pollinates, and the flower goes on to yield fruit. The fruit attracts a monkey that then carries away and eats the fruit, spitting out the seed that germinates and grows into a new tree. Flawless. And the unselected, rotting fruit still feed and seed the soil. It’s all integrated and accounted for — from the dead leaves to the fallen trees to the predators and prey to the wind, fire and snow — and nothing is out of place, in that waste approaches zero.
“This is so intricate, someone must have designed it.” We project our style way of engineering onto nature. We call nature perfect because it is the human who is fragmented and full of effort, piecing together isolated parts to create a whole. Nature isn’t trying.
Let me put it another way. Nature is coherent, but it didn’t strive for that. Coherence exists simply because incoherence cannot stand the test of time. Everything, seamlessly, seems to have a role, not by design, but because that’s just the way the cookie had to crumble.
There is a total harnessing out here — yet in flux — where waste approaches zero. It’s what I call a flawless turnover, and here, harmony is immanent.
We, on the flip side, are taught to make goals and chase them — and this is laughable in the face of how things truly work. We’ve built systems that are simply unintegrated — like industrial food production — held together by rules/incentives rather than by coherence, all while fighting — as opposed to aligning — with nature.
And in a system that lacks integration, there can only be fragmentation. What does this mean?
Tasty food vs healthy food. Work vs play. Learning vs living. Art vs business. Screens vs outdoors. Freedom vs security. Theory vs practice. Sustainability vs growth. The human mind has been mass-trained to divide and dissect; it too easily misses the oneness in things.
At the purest and most coherent/integrated level, there are no full-blown trade-offs. No, the best of this and the best of that can co-exist, yes, but also feed off and reinforce one another. The most delicious foods are also what is best for my body. My work is play. The bees and trees — honey and fruit — thrive together.
In other words, different worlds — even so-called opposites — are folded into one another; the “balance” is already baked in. At the truest forms, motion carries rest, nourishment carries lightness, and vice versa, and so on. Nature builds while it clears, and it clears while it builds. Think about a food that nourishes yet lightens, grounds yet lifts. There are many such examples.
Today’s meal is the tastiest thing you’ve eaten all week and it’s also what your body was asking for. Why put up with any less? Your play sharpens your craft. Your craft funds your life. Your life deepens your play.
Consequently, it is about the Whole. Those who live Whole, they tend to float. It’s being in three dimensions as opposed to two — perceiving the edges, the colours, the layers, the textures, the shadows, the faces, the orientation, and the spin — all at once — and attuning through the five senses, so directly, to the point of — maybe — unlocking a sixth, and dissolving things you once thought were true about — even — your very own self.