shredded

These past few days have been a bit more difficult. I must be honest.

My motivation has been crippling with each and every “please send us an email” and “we don’t know yet” or “we are deciding on the structure still” and probably my personal favourite so far is “we will call you back” which never ever happens. The silences that are filling spaces after the questionmark marks the room. It has been almost as interesting to observe how snow in April brought somehow more surprise and discussions than rising numbers of civilians killed every day in Ukraine. I felt questioned because I am not Ukrainian and still been trying to support people there and from there. I understand how priviledge works. I also understand that sometimes good deeds get questioned more than anything else in the world. If the world is so cruel how do you account for it, how do we think about it?! And when you do see the generosity, how do you know its really generous?!

It made me think about random things in the world and how not all of those things are 100% following Darwins theories. For example this species of amoeba, commonly known as slime mold, and as amoeba is a single cell organism, it usually lives on its own, but if the recourses are low, it starts sending a chemical sygnal and all other slime mold amoeba start doing the same and they start crawling until they meet and become one slug, that becomes one organism. And it stops somewhere sunny and 20% of top layer dye by creating the stock that allows the rest 80% to climb up and whistle with the wind like a dandelion looking for a better environment. And even to Darwin, altruism was always the elephant in the room.

And that got me thinking about George R. Price, who after a lot of different attempts to become famous for basically anything, he stumbled ont he idea about altruism survival of the fittest and how it all comes along and he writes an equation, which shows mathematically how an instinct could evolve. And the sadness that actually overcomes him is realization he write about “"If I can write a formal mathematical treatment of the evolution of a trait like altruism, what it means about the trait is that the trait is never really purely altruistic. If that's true, the world is a terrible place because it means that there can never be true selflessness in the world. My math means that there cannot ever be true selflessness and I can't accept a world like that." George Price further on chooses to live his life giving everything up, apologizing to his children and eventually taking his own life.

There is also another man who is evolutionary biologists Richard Dawkins, who says “The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”

And I put those thoughts into a mental caleidoscope and let them spin around for a minute. Because in the end of the day I know that I choose to connect those shredded pieces with love, hope, nurture, connection, faith, inspiration, creaitvity and everything I find both dear and fragile but always there. And I have people who are around me to be grateful for and with. Because my choise for the view through that caleidoscope is not chattered peaces of mathematical truth but raw and real human becomings…