The Rules of the Game

To make sense of our lives, we need to understand how the system we operate in really works. Nature is beautiful, brutal and indifferent to our suffering. But we can still be glad to be a part of it.

Apr 20, 2025

Easter is a time when nature really shows off. There’s an explosion of life. Beauty is everywhere - frothy blossom and vibrant colours (I took the below pictures on a short walk from my house). We are witnessing an unstoppable force in action - and rightly celebrate it. There are plenty of lessons that we can learn from how it operates - not least balance, patience and interconnectedness.

These aspects are real. But they have been written about endlessly, giving us only a partial picture of the system in which we operate. And if we are to make sense of our lives, to - as the poet, Mary Oliver puts it - “…see our place in the family of things”, we must stand back and consider nature as a whole. That means recognising its frequent brutality and complete indifference to the pain and suffering of the individual.

This is a system where there is hunter and prey; vitality and disease; petals and fluffy chicks, but also – apologies - pus and shit. Our response to this need not be despondency - but acceptance, a sense of perspective and, ultimately, a feeling of being blessed for having been a part of it all.

Nowhere is this clearer than Costa Rica. It’s the most biodiverse country on the planet and you cannot help but be struck by the majesty of nature.

Hummingbirds seem to be everywhere. The locals leave out sugared-water so they can enjoy them in their gardens.

The Sunsets are stunning.

The mountains dramatic.

But there is another side…

I was lucky enough to be taken to a beach where turtles lay their eggs. The conservationist guide told me only 5 percent of those that are laid survive to hatch; and only 1 percent of them survive to reproductive age.

Those are terrible odds…But there was something extraordinary about seeing these strangely beautiful creatures navigating by instinct, gliding towards a beach, lumbering ashore, digging a hole and laying eggs…Then later seeing footage of the tiny creatures hatching and edging their way back to the sea, defenceless against predators.

Following this process, it’s clear the system is all, and it is indifferent to the vast casualties along the way. Fairness doesn’t come into it. It’s a total lottery, with every survivor having come up against astronomical odds. The system only cares that some of its bets comes off – who makes it is of no consequence. Some of it is the survival of the fittest. Some of it is just pure luck.

I remembered this while reading Isabel Hardman’s book, “The Natural Health Service”. She mentions a tree that is many hundreds of years old and chooses that word - ‘indifferent’ - to describe its attitude to the history going on about it.

It has ‘seen’ so much – kings and queens rising and falling; hopes being fulfilled and dashed; so many who had come into its orbit, long forgotten. The tree survived them all.

Her point is that if nature is the great system that we are part of, we really have got the wrong end of the stick if we think that we are individually significant. And yet our egos push and demand, determined to assert ourselves while the system carries on regardless. Think about it – what is your problem set against this? What is your legacy? Is that event you struggled to engineer a win, a loss, or significant compared to the continuation of the great system? These questions are not an invitation to give up - rather a means to get it all into perspective.

Jon Krakauer’s book, ‘Into the Wild’, tells the story of Christopher McCandless, who gave up all his possessions to live as close to nature as possible. After some adventures, he ended up alone in the Alaskan wilderness. He prepared some food and believing he was eating something harmless, called wild sweet pea, he was, in fact, ingesting the very similar looking, but highly toxic wild potato plant, Hedysarum Alpinum. This resulted in his paralysis, starvation, and death. This is his final self portrait:

There is a deep and bitter irony in the fact that the nature he thought would sustain and elevate him, killed him. He admired its beauty - but discovered it can also be unknowing, uncaring, indifferent.

He left a final note pleading for anyone who might come by to help:

ATTENTION POSSIBLE VISITORS.
S.O.S.
I NEED YOUR HELP. I AM INJURED, NEAR DEATH, AND TOO WEAK TO HIKE OUT OF HERE. I AM ALL ALONE, THIS IS NO JOKE. IN THE NAME OF GOD, PLEASE REMAIN TO SAVE ME. I AM OUT COLLECTING BERRIES CLOSE BY AND SHALL RETURN THIS EVENING. THANK YOU,
CHRIS McCANDLESS
AUGUST ?

There is no moral to this story - at least as we humans understand it. No right or wrong. No sense. Just what can and did happen in the system in which we operate.

Ted Hughes’ poetry takes us on a grim march further down this dark road. In his poem, “February 17th”, he tells the story of how: “A lamb could not get born”. Over the course of the next few verses, we are immersed in the gritty detail of realising that the lamb is stillborn, stuck and Hughes must deal with it:

“…I went two miles for the injection and the razor.”

At the poem’s end is an image as horrifying as any I have read:

“In a smoking slither of oils and soups and syrups,

the body lay born, beside the hacked off head.”

In another poem, Hughes almost rubs our noses in this side of nature. “Pike” introduces fish that are, “Killers from the egg” and have a “malevolent, aged grin.” He tells us how he kept three in a tank:

“Suddenly there were two. Finally one,

With a sag of belly and grin it was born with.

And indeed they spare nobody…

One jammed past its gills down the other’s gullet.”

It is Hughes that will not spare us from confronting reality. This is an extreme way of telling us the system makes no moral judgment – often pitiless and murderous, sometimes even cannibalistic. It does not deal in our human concepts of right and wrong. There is no should or should not in nature – only is.

This is not as negative as it might sound. When I spoke to the journalist, Isabel Hardman about her book, “The Natural Health Service”, she described the healing powers of nature, realising how its indifference could be profoundly beneficial to people with mental health problems:

ISABEL: I was talking to a psychiatrist at Bethlem Royal Hospital who'd been doing tree focused walks with some of the patients. If you're in Bethlem, you're really sick…you may actually have been through the criminal justice system as well.
And this psychiatrist said that one of the things that a lot of the patients he was working with said was they liked the fact that the tree wasn't interested in them, because the tree didn't know anything about their illness. The tree didn't see them as this patient who'd been sectioned on this date, who was going to be reviewed on this date, and whose sectioning followed this incident. The tree didn't have any preconceptions about them at all. The tree was just there, photosynthesising without them.
CRAIG: And there's, definitely something about some mental health issues where you become very self-focused [Totally] and you're acting as if the world is just revolving around you, but actually, in nature, you see that you're just part of a much bigger system. And if you come or go, it's not really gonna make a huge amount of difference.
ISABEL: Yeah, but I think also, just on a sort of flesh and blood level, we've evolved alongside and within nature. And it's only in the past century and a bit that we've really started to deliberately cut ourselves off from it.

And it’s this last point I really want to explore next week. What do we do once we have the full beautiful, brutal, indifferent picture of Nature? What should our attitude and approach be - knowing that this system is wild in all senses - and we are part of it.

I will show how great minds have helped us see that recognising these truths liberates us – enabling us to go with the flow, work with the system to embrace what the poet Mary Oliver calls our: “One wild and precious life.”

The Rules of the Game

To make sense of our lives, we need to understand how the system we operate in really works. Nature is beautiful, brutal and indifferent to our suffering. But we can still be glad to be a part of it.

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