"Nature is Both Generous and Ferocious"

While on a walk one morning, I spotted a cat in my neighbor’s yard. I saw something in its mouth, so I got closer to get a better look at what it was.

What poor creature did this cat snatch up for breakfast?

• A bird?

• A rat?

• A lizard?

When I got just a few feet away, I got an answer: it didn’t have anything in its mouth, that flesh I saw was its mouth.

Unfortunately, the cat had a golf ball-sized tumor on the left side of his face. Honestly, I had a hard time looking at it once I made that realization, so I looked away.

But then I paused for a second and realized how ridiculous that repulsion was. So I turned back and stared at the cat until I committed his face to memory.

“This is what life is,” I told myself as I looked upon the stray cat and its deformed face. I also thought of Marcus Aurelius’ advice in Meditations to break things down into what they really are:

After all, Stoicism’s main tenet is to control what you can control, and pay no mind to that which you cannot control. Since I can’t do anything about the tumor, I have to accept the fact that the cat can survive that way. In fact, the cat doesn’t seem to care, so why should I?

The tumor, then, becomes a malignant mass of flesh. And to quote Marcus again, “this is what nature has prescribed”. No need to go grieving over Nature’s decisions.

Hayao Miyazaki’s main theme in his films is nature, and he summed up humanity’s flawed view of it in an old interview: “We see birds that harm humans as harmful and those that are useful to humans as useful. It’s all arbitrary...Nature that is generous is, at the same time, nature that is ferocious.”

It’s why issues like conservationism are complicated. Animals and plants have gone extinct long before humans were around; were those extinctions morally wrong too?

Or if we agree that Nature knows best, are we not part of nature? How much of nature’s wounds are we allowed to repair, then? All of them? None of them?

I’m not saying that I have the answers. I definitely don't. What I am suggesting is that we must realize that “good” and “bad” are human constructs. And more importantly, that these issues we fight over are not black and white.

People who fight against abortion pine for the death penalty. Environmentalists contribute to carbon emissions whenever they drive their vehicles.

We are all walking contradictions, and that realization helps whenever we catch ourselves about to criticize someone.

I think about that every time I see that cat in the morning.