The Reality of the Situation

Shit, as they say, happens

The world is an awesome place. There are geologic formations that steal your breath away; volcanoes that show the fire and fury of Nature’s turmoil; clouds and wind that rip and tear at our hats, toques, and jackets; fierce rains that come lancing down from the sky and any number of other beautifully ferocious things. There are animals that are resplendent in colour, deadly in proximity, and gentle in demeanour. There are the awkward, adorable, and sometimes comically composed creations of millions of years of evolutionary fuckery all leading to the world we’re still discovering in the 21st century. Amazing, isn’t it?

Despite all this grandeur around us, we’re still basic meat sacks composed of cosmic dust. We have biological processes that need satisfaction; we have to eat, sleep, poop, and exist all within a sphere hurtling around a continual nuclear explosion millions of miles away called “the sun.” It’s somewhat dreadful to think about, really. Any closer, we’d be scorched; farther away, we’d freeze. And yet, here we are.

Like the animals we are, we arrange ourselves in finery, showing our clothing, our cars, our status through the various trinkets and such that we choose to line our dens. We dance in our bought plumage like unabashed birds, growl and yell at each other to mark our “territories,” and exhibit base tendencies to be just as vicious as the animals we claim are “less than us.”

You have to laugh at the fact that regardless of our finery and flippancy, we’re no different, really, than the birds and the bees. We exhibit the same tendencies, penchant for thievery and community, processes and procedures, etc. We eat, sleep, poop, just like everything else. We consume, void, and move on, roaming the earth and our little corner of the universe like the migratory birds and wolves we find domestically on our terra firma. And still, for all that we know we are, we claim, with an undue amount of hubris, that we’re still better.

I wonder, sometimes, about the etymology of the phrase “shit happens.” It’s almost as if it was ripped from our casual observation of the world around us, almost as if there is a common agreement that beyond the veil, we’re all doing the exact same thing, being the exact same way, exhibiting the exact same form of behaviours. If this holds true, then every posture, pose, pretence, premonition, falsity and truth have been done before by someone, somehow. 

The religions we organise ourselves under, like an umbrella seeking to somehow avoid a god’s wrath, are nothing more than the inevitable commingling of community. It’s like a raucous community of penguins on King George Island, squawking and shitting on everything, preening and posturing for the next great look from a potential “mate” (the analogy holds in most fundamental institutions). The political dogmas we hold ourselves to are, in essence, clinging to the cliffs of desperation, a choke-hold on the shifting dirt and sand like the great cormorant seen above, holding out against hope that maybe this time, we’ll get what we want. We toss our shit over the edge of humanity, hoping that we’re rid of what offends us.

And yet, here we are in a cycle of nativism, fascism, and religious terrorism masked as “fundamentalism,” and by God, the world is in a state. We’re gobsmacked that we could descend so far from our enlightened positions as apex predators, denigrating ourselves for the sake of the “less successful” and chucking about words and phrases like “artificial general intelligence” and “universal basic compute” as if shilling Silicon Valley douchebags like Sam Altman or Elon Musk will somehow elevate us all. 

I admire birds for many reasons, but perhaps today, for the singular reason that they understand, against all odds, that shit happens. They exist within the flow of Nature’s undulations and cycles, riding her thermals and currents, seeking food, shelter, and a mate. They, implicitly or otherwise, understand that they exist within an endless cycle and that their role is to be. They proceed through sunrises and sunsets, eating, sleeping, pooping, being, without another thought for the foment the world is going through. They understand change insofar as it affects their ability to thrive; they evolve and adapt over generations to assimilate to a new will, a new order, a new cycle. We may marvel at what they are today, but understanding how they’ve persisted through the epochs of time is frankly glorious.

My dear souls, you may find it trite to compare our current estates to that of our avian copatriots, but I find that for every attempt to draw us farther away from the creatures that we are in community with, we lose that much more of our humanity and understanding. We need to look to the natural order, the beasts and fowl complimenting our earthly demesne, to truly understand our place and purpose. Perhaps when we’re willing to admit that shit happens, we’ll be ready to tackle the next cycle of our societies, governments, and institutions and influence the outcomes we so desperately want.

May it ever be so.