I watched a bird commit a violent act today. It had in its beak a bug; its breakfast, one can assume. It banged the bug against the roof repeatedly to knock it unconscious. I listened to the tap-tap-tapping sound of the insect’s armor proving to be useless against the necessity of nature. It was fascinating to watch survival of the fittest in action – one creature taking what it needed to sustain itself, another trying, and failing, to survive the attack. Each of them acting on nothing else but impulse and nature, violent and beautiful and futile. 

We are supposed to be separate and above these simple creatures; them devoid of reason and logic, while we surpass them because we are conscious, sentient. Beings with souls. And yet as supposedly elevated beings, we commit the same acts every single day: husbands beating wives, children killing children, governments watching people die of hunger, billionaires and a trillionaire existing. Tap-tap-tap goes the predator, its prey helpless against its sharpened beak. 

The bird then flew away with its prize, never knowing it was perceived. I sat there a bit longer, mind afloat. An old man jogged by, an even older one biked along. A car zoomed past my house, its passengers blissfully unaware of how violently birds start their day. I closed my eyes and listened. Tweets and chirps. The leaves rustling in the breeze. A rooster crowing in the distance. A dog barks. Someone is sweeping the street somewhere. My son opening his bedroom door and drinking a glass of water in the kitchen, unaware that his mother was right outside, pondering nature and nurture and all the strange things that make us human. 

It’s easy to focus on the injustice of everything around us, especially when it comes to you uninvited. It is loud and sharp, like a hot knife slicing through butter. One day you are just living your life, existing, and the next you are something’s meal. You do your diligent duty of voting for the “right” people, and yet here you are contemplating if you have enough to buy this eggplant or should you wait for the next paycheck to come? Or maybe you have a child, precious and promising, and you raise him to be strong and pursue his dreams, and just when it was at his fingertips, he drowns in some distant ocean. Or maybe you send your kids to school one day but they never come home, because another child decided it would be fun to shoot them down. The only difference between us and the bug is the bug is blissfully unaware.

Tap-tap-tap.

Why, in the face of all these horrors, do we persist? What is it in humanity that makes us push past the pain and torture and the certainty of death? Why do we power through the “what’s the point?” thoughts? Why, while bloody and torn to shreds, do we continue to crawl across this surface of broken glass shards and hot coal? Why is it that against the deafening TAP-TAP-TAP of a world full of heartless predators, we, the most evolved of all creatures on earth, insist on continuing on?

I consider the bird again. Imagine it flying away, soaring through the sunrise and back to its nest filled with little chicks awaiting their sustenance. Chicks that will grow into their feathers. If they are fit enough to survive nature, they will one day make a nest of their own and feed their own young. There will be many songs sung by those birds, songs that may be a healing balm to the troublesome thoughts of a mother trying to find a moment of solace before her day begins.

I consider the old men jogging and biking, much closer to their deaths than they are to the day they were born, persisting against time. They push their bodies so that with whatever time they have remaining will be lived well. And perhaps with those final decades they can nurture their grandchildren and their communities, passing on wisdom that can only be received from a lifetime of mistakes and learning.

I consider the leaves of the trees, the billowing breeze, the rooster crowing, the sound of the person sweeping the street. I consider my place in all of it, all of us existing at the same time, separate and yet one, like grains of sand moved by the ebb and flow of mighty waters.

We persist because that is what it means to be human. It is written into our very code to rebel against chaos and formlessness; we are built to find reason and order and beauty in the mess of it all. We were not meant to live in isolation from each other, whether in body or in spirit. In our cells, in the subatomic particles, written into every fiber of our being, is the unknowable and yet absolute truth that this here life is not the end.

If we listened to that voice more, if we gave more credence to that deep ache of humanity within us, maybe there would be fewer horrors. But for as long as we exist, so will beauty and violence, both often born of each other. We can try to avoid it, but that would be akin to asking the sun to stop rising or for the tides to be still.

The bird starts its day with violence because it knows no other way. To the bird, it is a thing of beauty that it is strong enough to provide sustenance for itself or its young. It must do what it must to survive. But we are not birds. We are beings created in the image of God, and we have the privilege (or burden?) of reason and the ability to choose. So what will you choose today?

tap-tap-tap.