A loud horn breaks me from my reverie and I look out to the right to see the cars banked up on the road just outside the gardens. Unfortunately I am not in the great outdoors but in the Botanic Gardens in the middle of the city, trying to get inspired to do some study.
Being here makes me think though. What was wrong with nature and the way things were? Who woke up and decided that they needed to build a tall metal structure higher then ever before? Who decided that things would be better if we made everything synthetically, if we industrialised all the processes of life?
I realise that I am not one to talk, I have embraced this industrialised life and live with the perks of it everyday but is it really better? Is life better now that we no longer need to talk to people face to face? We can simply get on the Internet and send off a quick email or instant message.
I think that we have lost something essential to ourselves in this modern world. Life seems to be getting more and more fast paced and there seems to be less and less reasons to need to go outside or even to talk to people nowadays. Who sits outside and just listens to the birds chatter or just sits in quiet? Just thinks about life and admires the beauty around them.
It makes me wonder if the reason that there are so many people with mental illnesses is due to the modern world. A world in which the personal touch is missing, a world where taking time out can lead to missing out. Are people breaking down because they have failed to get to know themselves? Because they haven't stopped and gotten to know the world around them? Because they haven't even thought about the reason why they exist? And when they do stop to think its all too much for them. Where do you start when getting to know yourself? When you having been living your whole life getting pulled along by the current and finally stop to question. Your whole life up until then can feel meaningless. And if you have never known meaning or passion how can you even begin to try and find it?
This reminds me of the character of Dysart in the play Equus. He is a psychiatrist who is treating a particularly disturbed and confused patient, after having treated so many patients before him he begins to question his methods. Is he actually healing these patients or taking away their Passion? Is he taking away their reason for life that has been distorted or confused by society?
Dysart himself has never known Passion, not in love and not in life. When he finally tries to break away from society and find it he is at a loss of where to start. He does not know how to "cure" these patients and give them a healthy Passion because he does not know what that is. He has lived his whole life being pulled along by the current of society and now he is left with so many questions that, he feels, can never be answered.
I think that the answer to all this lies simply in nature. All the questions do not matter if you can simply be. Connect to nature, connect to who you were made to be and follow God's guiding voice. The world may be rushing and busy and the Industrialised world may be more efficient and effective but there is no substitute for life.
Life and meaning cannot be synthesised.
And life can be found in nature.
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