Noticing - Or Not Noticing

Snowdrops peeping out from the cold earth of Scotland, the days growing slowly longer - both mean Spring is round the corner. It's noticeable if you happen to notice the world around you, which is sometimes easier for some than for others.

Noticing the world turning is a habit of mine; I've always done it - indulged my senses - chiefly sight, whilst walking near my home or further afield.

And this has led me to thinking - wondering - how early mankind viewed what I view - how what he saw then changed his perception of Nature - of the laws that govern it - govern us - govern everything.

I have my books and my schooling to inform me of the reality of the world out of doors. I know how our world revolves on its axis to give us day and night, and how it revolves around the sun to give us our seasons. I understand how its tilt gives us different climatic conditions - those we associate with the four seasons, and I understand how our weather is influenced by wind and by water.

Watching the days lengthening and the snow falling one day and not the next, I come to think by myself, not now with the aid of books and schooling, though they help me, but now I think an original thought - not original to scientists - but original to me.

I come to know that the way we revolve around the sun, and on our own axis gives conditions that are far more predictable than those conditions controlled by Nature working under our skies.

The sun comes up at the same time every day - the same time, plus an exact amount as Spring arrives. Later, it will rise later and later as Winter comes on. The days lengthen or shorten by precise amounts - the same from year to year.

The snow, when it does come, comes sporadically, if it comes at all. Some winters are full of snow, some winters it hardly snows at all. It is far less exact. It depends upon so many variables, ones which don't affect the sun's ability to shine and bring daylight earlier and earlier at this time of year.

Men must have noticed what I notice, even when mammoths roamed the planet. How they assimilated what their senses told them with what they already knew - with what they didn't know? How much easier is it for me to place what my senses tell me into those spaces left by my ignorance of reality? How much smaller are those spaces left by my ignorance than the spaces left by the ignorance of man walking the Earth in the days when the mammoth roamed?

How differently do my spaces left by ignorance get filled by new knowledge, and how much more quickly does new knowledge crowd in to fill any space that remains? The human brain is a wonderful thing - it has space enough for all that comes - information - knowledge - transformed by us into wisdom and thought.

If the human brain functioned then as it does now, there is no reason to suppose the forming of thought and then of wisdom was facilitated any differently. It is just that now the average human brain has more to deal with - less empty space - more space crammed with knowledge.

If, as we might hope, our brain has the potential to hold more and more information - to infinity - then we surely should be able to bring wisdom to bear on those problems that beset us daily. I would say that is a reasonable assumption to make.

For every person noticing snowdrops springing up out of the cold earth, noticing the hours of daylight lengthening, there are many who do not notice such simple phenomena.

Not noticing probably means not thinking. 'The world is too much with us', Wordsworth once said, continuing, 'getting and spending we lay waste our powers, little we see in Nature that is ours.'

Those spaces left by our ignorance are most likely crowded out by information more urgent and more vital to our survival, we think, and yet if we don't allow some knowledge from the world outside our confines to enter, our minds, how can we progress in ways that treat Nature as our provider, and how much thought will we ever give to those systems that while sustaining us, do so in ever straightened circumstances - stamped upon by the reality of the here and now - of the importance in our lives of our need to earn a living.

And if we allow such thoughts to crowd our vision of how life is, how much more quickly will those natural systems go unregarded in our plans to move on through our headlong rush to prosperity.