Nature - my antidepressant
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| YenAlia on a Rambutan tree See the full video here |
I love climbing trees ever since I was a kid. I enjoy adventures. Thrilling activities in nature gives me energy. The trees are like medicine to me. They give me cool and fresh air or wind that I love to inhale especially when it brings a smell of green grasses or flowers. It is so relaxing watching the sun rays on the leaves (termed komorebi in Japan) and the blue sky is just fascinating. These gifts of nature alone gives me happiness and as I see ripe fruits on the trees, the smile on my face can reach my ears. Nothing can defeat the gifts of nature.
Unfortunately, many people are abusing these gifts. Many trees are cut down or burned to expand their plantations or build new infrastructures. Acres of land or mountains that hold the trees were lost to create new roads or they are excavated to get the minerals needed for the creation of new luxurious things.
The Gifts of Nature and Human Abuse
The gifts of nature have been abused for centuries. We are overwhelmed with the advancement of technologies that we forgot where or how everything started. Maybe we did not forget, we just did not bother knowing how everything began. The new generations especially those living in first world countries or highly urbanized places might have not experienced a life close to nature.
I’m a millennial, and I admit that I also love the technology we have today. I will not be able to create this blog and share my story without it. I am very grateful to those who made things easier for this generation, but now that we are aware of how nature can easily destroy everything we have created, maybe it’s time we make some changes and act on climate change.
The world is in crisis, probably because of the human activities that have caused nature to change. We keep on creating something that we believe can extend or save lives. What we did not realize is that we are making our own destruction.
We’ve been doing experiments that we think are sustainable, but no human creation has lived for centuries that has sustained lives. Only the gifts of nature can do that such as trees. I doubted that statement so, I made a research with Google. I typed “trees that live for centuries” and the result is vast. I clicked the search result on top which is from BBC UK. I believe they are a credible source of information. I read the whole article and I was absolutely surprised. I thought the maximum life expectancy of a tree is only 100 years, but based on that article, a kind of pine tree can live for more than 4,800 years. (Aren’t you amazed?) After knowing that, I looked for a technology that has lived for centuries, only to find none. I found something though. I replaced the word technology with tools in my research. I used the phrase “oldest tool found” and there were great results. I clicked the result from the National Geographic and those tools (yes, it’s plural) were declared two million years old. If you love history and science, you are probably aware of what kind of tools they are. They were found in China at the site called Shangchen. Around 100 stone tools were found there. Stone tools which are obviously made from stone (well, they are actually sharpened or formed stone), are one of the gifts of nature. If you know how real stones are made, you will not wonder.
My reset with nature brought me this far. I’ve been thinking about how to make this long because the vlog related to this is boring. Thanks to the gifts of nature and human creations (phone, internet, Google, etc.), I found a way to expand this article.
Balance is all we need to avoid the vast destruction nature can do to all creations.
