What nature teaches us about change

At the beginning of lockdown, I heard a lot of discussion about the “new normal”: what everyday life might look like after all this was over. Sometimes predictions were practical—we’d choose barbecues over dinner parties, classrooms would be half empty—but more often, the phrase invoked some utopian ideal.

Some spoke of lockdown as a kind of corrective. We couldn’t have gone on the way we had before, the argument went: our globe-trotting, fuel-guzzling existence saw us visiting too many people and doing too many things, exhausting ourselves and polluting the world as we did so. Might a period of isolation and local living force us to take stock of our lives and pare back?

My initial reaction was scepticism: could we really expect to emerge from a pandemic (and the resultant economic downturn) happier and better rested? That gloomy attitude followed me through the next few weeks as I swung back and forth between obsessively reading the news on my phone to ignoring it completely.

A lot has been written about the solace of nature, and I’ve always understood those consolations as ones of escapism. Switch off your phone, forget your cares. But as I picked my way along the coastal path each day, I began to understand that going outside offered me something else as well: a new way of looking at the world. I found myself reframing current events according to what I saw around me.

Every day, the sun rose a little earlier, and a little higher. A new flower opened. Gradually, winter’s dun landscape was transformed, blade by blade, bud by bud. As chicks hatched from eggs, every crack in every drystone wall was noisy with their demands—a chattering from all directions. Dandelions shone like gold coins, closed, metamorphosed, then reopened as clocks, shedding seed into the wind like snow. The caterpillars sealed themselves away in chrysalises and cocoons, dissolved and reformed as butterflies and moths.

In a bowl in my kitchen, I kept a dozen tadpoles in water from a lily pond in the hill above my house. Over a period of weeks I saw them swell, grow fat and heavy-lidded. I liked to watch them swim around. Then the transfiguration began.

At first their edges grew strange and indistinct, no longer totally solid. I could see through them, follow the outlines of their internal organs. One morning, as if by magic, two had sprung tiny legs—fully formed—that kicked behind them as they swam. At first these legs were pale and ghostly: slightly transparent, like glass noodles. They had skeletal toes, and moved with a weak, off-kilter motion that made me feel a little sick. Two days later, arms had appeared: thin and useless, ending in stumps. They grasped clumsily at strands of pondweed and rested just below the surface, or pulled themselves partially from the water onto a protruding rock.

They were weird to watch. Still, I couldn’t look away. Over the next couple of days these limbs grew and solidified. Their tails shortened, and drew back into their bodies. Though still tiny—about the size of a fingernail—they were now, inarguably, more frog than tadpole.

When they began to climb the sides of the bowl, we knew it was time to release them. We tottered up the path to the pond with the new frogs in a mason jar, and poured the whole lot back in. As I did so, I felt a flash of something. Maybe hope. Change is possible. It may be fast and profound. Nature tells us so.

I feel it in the air now, sense it moving in the wind. Change is coming. But what kind of change are we facing?