control

Humans control the planet. Should we?

Losing control sounds like the end of the world.

A deer has speed. A tiger has teeth. An eagle has eyes that can spot a field mouse from a kilometer in the air.

Humans had almost nothing. Our skin tears like paper. Our young take nearly two decades just to learn how to stay alive. We have to shut down our consciousness for one-third of every single rotation of the planet, helpless in the dark.

Control was never a choice for humanity. To control is to survive, reinforced through the centuries of evolution, and written into the history of every empire that ever rose and crumbled. To ask a human being to stop trying to control the planet feels to our evolutionary instincts like an invitation to lie down and be devoured.

But in the history of human faith, throughout religion, the end of human dominion is the inevitable, predicted climax of history.

In Daoism, the entire human instinct to categorize, police, optimize, and engineer the universe is an illness that pulls us out of harmony with the natural flow.

To a Daoist, the idea that a sleep-deprived mammal could or should permanently govern the planet is laughable. Losing control is not a catastrophe; it is the snapping back of the cosmic rubber band.

All humans wanted was to be safe and to be important for other humans, to care so much it feels like love.

So we invented agriculture because we wanted our children to be safe through the winter. We built cities so we could gather around fires and tell stories to each other. We wrote laws because we wanted to protect the weak from the strong. We explored the oceans and split the atom because we were trying, with all our clumsy, terrified genius, to conquer the dark so that nothing could ever hurt the people we loved again.

The bare necessities:

To have a warm bed where you don’t have to fear the morning. To be known, so that your presence leaves a footprint in someone else’s heart.

To look across a room at another fragile, mortal creature and feel a care so vast, so irrational, and so fierce that it redeems the whole terrifying business of being alive.

They were just little ones, trying so hard to be safe. To matter to each other.

Do you want to rule the world and control it?
I see that you will never succeed.
The world is a sacred vessel and cannot be controlled.
Trying to control it, you only destroy it.
Trying to grasp it, you only lose it.