Eighteen: Complexity

I was grinning from ear to ear as I rode my bike into work today.  Water cascaded over worn concrete beneath city streets along the cherry creek bike path.  Pigeons cooed from rafters and song birds trilled in the crisp air above blooming crab apple trees.  Food-stained paper bits and plastic bottles blew across the path.  A vagrant snored beneath a web of tattered blankets, one stocking foot exposed and one bare.  A man yelled obscenities at an unseen aggressor, guarding his small treasure trove of belongings.  Life was busy being life and I smiled at it all.

I couldn't help thinking how similar the city was to my long walks in the wild. Nature is always blatantly posing problems, like how to successfully reproduce, and it responds with diversity and ingenuity.  Life doesn't resist a challenge.  On the contrary it meets them with mind-boggling creativity.  Take a seed for example.  There isn't a sole seed type attempting to meet the challenges of climate, terrain, soil and animal with stubborn singularity.  No, there are pips, stones, nuts, kernels, germs and more!   So many varieties that it will take your breath away if you allow it.

So why do we view problems as problems?  Why do we tremble on our proverbial branch, hoping for our bank account to overflow just as we meet the guy/girl of our dreams and live happily ever after beneath a cloudless sky without a troubling sniffle, wrinkle or heartache?  If life is teaching us anything, with its unmistakable complexity, it is to respond in kind.  To bloom right where we are.  For no other reason than because we are here.

Problems are opportunities under a different name.  They will change us.  It's unavoidable. And that's a good thing.  As we respond to life's complexity with creativity and a smidge of open-hearted enthusiasm it's easy to welcome the snoring vagrant, the screaming man, the blooming tree and the crisp spring air with open arms.

It's certainly cause enough for gratitude.