I Saved a Caterpillar
What have I done?
The other day I was outside performing my ritual slow suicide (smoking) and I noticed a caterpillar crawling around on our outdoor table. It was one of those cute, yet menacing, caterpillars. You know the ones that look furry, but their “fur” is actually poisonous spines meant to protect it from predators and curious young children?
[flashback]
One day, I was sitting in the back of my dad’s pickup truck and riding around on country roads that more properly should be called “trails that happen to be just big enough for a vehicle”. Country roads is quicker to say, however. While riding, I felt a sting on my arm. No biggie, just a random pain. Nothing a stout boy can’t handle. I relaxed my arm back into my lap. I felt another sting on almost exactly spot. I look down on my shirt and one of these furry caterpillars had fallen out of a tree and into my lap. I don’t remember panicking or frenziedly killing the thing. I think I calmly flicked it off my shirt.
My arm was definitely in pain. As if I had been stung by a wasp or bee. Even the stoutest of boys must work to hold back tears of pain. I didn’t cry. I had long conquered that response to pain. A manly achievement. But I did notify my dad that I had been stung twice by this very cute caterpillar. So he stopped the truck administered some redneck toxin therapy. He spat some tobacco onto the sting sites. “Tobacco pulls the poison out,” he said. It helped and the pain soon subsided and only a couple of red spots would remain from the attack.
[end flashback]
I watched this caterpillar crawl from one edge of the metal table to the other. When it would reach one side, it’d reach out into the air with it’s little stubby front legs to find nothing to grasp onto. Then it would turn around and walk to the other edge and do the same thing. I don’t know how long this caterpillar had been going around in circles like this.
If it kept this up, it’s likely to die on this table, I thought. There’s nothing to eat for the caterpillar on our table, just some dried up leaves that might sustain it. I don’t know the culinary tastes and preferences of caterpillars. So it would either be found by a bird easily on the table for which it is not camouflaged to blend into. Or it would die a slow death of starvation. Worst it may get weakened to a point where it would be attacked and eaten by ants or a spider while it’s still alive but doesn’t have the strength to do anything about it.
I pitied the caterpillar and it’s pitiable fate.
In my pity, I decided to intervene. I grabbed a lengthy twig (You won’t sting me little insect!) and sat it in the caterpillar’s path. Once it had crawled onto the twig, I lifted the caterpillar up and over to the nearest low hanging tree branch. It crawled off the twig as if nothing had happened. As if another, larger, more intelligent (?) being had not just lifted it from a food-less wasteland to an Eden of green leaves to munch on. I wonder if it thought it found this new home all on it’s own? Or did it think it had found a magic flying twig?
At this point I could muse about my relationship with God and how I am like that caterpillar. I won’t though. That’s not what this article is about.
My purpose with this post is to talk about consequences. Actions have consequences. No being is exempt from this brute fact, even that sinister, cute little caterpillar. We all act. We destroy something when we consume it for food and energy. We can also help other beings survive and thrive. Caterpillars turn into butterflies and butterflies help pollinate plants, sometimes the same plants that they ate in their youth.
Inaction has consequences too. Things move about on their trajectories unless something interacts or interferes (depending on if you want to judge it so). It’s Newton’s law of inertia. We can’t escape consequences. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, as the old saying goes.
Before when I was just watching the caterpillar go around in circles, I foresaw its doom. I only saw possible futures in which it would die prematurely and never get the chance to become the butterfly it’s meant to become. I made a conscious decision to intervene in its life trajectory. I altered its fate by my conscious actions.
As the caterpillar waddled around on the tree branch, I immediately had a strange feeling. I could see the possible futures in which this caterpillar lived and turned into a beautiful butterfly that would mate and entire family genealogies of butterflies would now exist because I saved this poor little guy.
Of course there’s entirely the possibility that it could still get eaten or fall of the tree branch again, or both. But in that moment in which we shared the same space and time, I saw its predicament and gave it a second chance. It now had the opportunity to live more and grow into a butterfly.
I don’t know the consequences of my actions. I don’t know if I just changed the trajectory of not only the caterpillar, but all future caterpillars from it’s line and the plants that would be pollinated by the butterflies to come. I don’t know if that caterpillar was promptly eaten by a bird, or fed to the bird’s young, or a spider or ants or whatever else eats caterpillars.
What I do know is that I made a tiny difference in the world with my actions. I know that I can’t help but make that difference in the world, whether I want to or not. The world will continue on its course whether I decide to interact with it or not. By being here, being alive and breathing on this planet, my existence is consequential. My actions and inaction are consequential. My beliefs and ideas that guide and inform my actions/inaction are consequential.
I know this to be true of you as well. As I stated above, no living being is exempt. If you move, breathe, or change the configuration of matter and energy in the world in any way, then you are part of the flow. As thinking beings, we have the burden, responsibility, and gift of choosing our actions and choosing among possible futures, not only for ourselves but for others as well. More often than not, even with the best of intentions, things don’t turn out as we thought they would. That’s due to our ignorance and we can’t help that either. There’s often too many variables and information that doesn’t make itself readily apparent to what we perceive and think we know about a situation.
Science is humanity’s best tool for navigating these uncertain waters. Does science often get things wrong? Yes. It’s biggest strength is it’s honesty of approach. Any self-respecting scientist will tell you that they’re always looking to disprove their theories. Science is built upon falsifiability. If a theory can’t be proven wrong, then it’s not a scientific theory and is rightfully outright rejected by other scientists. There is always an underlying uncertainty to any scientific theory, and therefore there is always an underlying uncertainty to the application of those theories.
We can’t escape uncertainty, but we can approximate it. We can give a probability of certainty. This will have to do, because with an unprovable theory you’re stuck with even more uncertainty because you can never know if you’re right or wrong in any circumstance. At least with the approximated certainty of science we can guess that we’re right at least some of the time. The fruits of this thinking has panned out to all of the ways in which science has changed and improved living conditions and life spans for many of us. The physics and chemistry that makes my air conditioning work may only be understood with near certainty by scientists, engineers, and HVAC techs, but that’s apparently good enough as I’m sitting in a cool house on a warm summer day.
Science can’t tell me what happened to that caterpillar. I can make guesses and give them probabilities. My probabilities, which are simply scientific models, would probably more closely align with what actually happened if I were to have more knowledge and data about caterpillars, their life processes, what they eat, what they’re natural predators are, how clumsy are they and how often do they fall from limbs… You get the idea. The more data you have, the more educated your guesses become. There’s always the chance you get it wrong, but more knowledge tends to make your guesses look more like reality.
I could have ended the world by saving that caterpillar, or I could have saved the world. I don’t know. I can kinda know if I knew more, but I don’t know that much. None of us individually know that much, but we must live and act. We must admit what we don’t know and trust others that do know. Collectively, we have quite a bit of knowledge that could benefit us all, if we cared to listen to and respect one another. Science and education is not an enemy to faith or faith-based beliefs. They are supplements and allies. No matter what you believe, there’s always uncertainty and any belief that claims to alleviate all uncertainty is a false and dangerous belief. Yet even actions based on those false beliefs have consequences. Entire genealogies of people have been wiped out and continue to be. Entire possible worlds are gone now because someone was certain that they were right.
Don’t lie to yourself. But also be brave in your actions. You can’t help but be consequential, but you can at least try to make better consequences with what little knowledge you have. You increase your chances of doing good things by relying on the work others have done to increase knowledge. Faith beckons you to be a beacon of light in this world, science is your tool to achieve it. We have choices. Not acting is a choice. Our choices have consequences. Choose wisely.
