You are a Cell Not an Organism

A couple of years ago I started growing plants. In the beginning, I was taking care of them, but soon enough I started learning from them. There are a few realizations that I would have never achieved if it wasn’t for my garden.

The first thing is the timescale at which plants live. When you look at them they don’t really look alive at all. They don’t move, and hardly anything changes. You can watch them for hours without noticing a single sign of life. You can take care of them for days or weeks without seeing any progress. And then suddenly, one day you take a closer look and you realize that the same plant you have been watering for months is now completely changed — from its leaves to its flowers, there is almost nothing left of the previous version of itself. Yet you didn’t see any progress at all. Now there is probably some metaphor here about long-term versus short-term progress and how change accumulates over time, but in this essay, I am not really interested in that. This time we are talking about scales.

As a human myself I am very aware of how easy it is to assume that my perspective is the only perspective in the Universe. That everything else is somehow wrong or at least a bit off — I am the standard, the yardstick. This is of course nothing more than my solipsism speaking and we shouldn’t pay too much attention to such feelings. The timescale of my life is only one of the billions of different variations that exist in nature. The constant movement, the neverending urge to produce and reproduce to consume and be…