I’m partial to snails and envy them in times of stressful decision-making. Desert snails can aestivate (a kind of hibernation) for years, sealing themselves in their shells with a layer of mucus until rain returns. It is a radical decision to pause life, guided only by tiny environmental cues like humidity. Sounds kinda nice.
This was a week when science was even more present in Flagstaff. It made me wonder: what does science tell us about how nature makes decisions? I have had plenty of my own to wrestle with lately, and I found myself looking to nature for inspiration.
It turns out nature decides constantly, though not the way we do. Ant colonies send out scouts when it is time to move nests. Each scout returns with news of a possible site. Slowly, through tiny acts of recruitment, the colony converges on one option. No leader or vote, but a decision emerges, stronger for being shared.
Trees decide, too. A root tip will choose one path over another, guided by gradients of moisture and nutrients. Sunlight pulls a branch in one direction while gravity steadies the trunk. What appears to be growth is also a choice, negotiated moment by moment with the environment.
Even the smallest cells must decide to divide, to repair, to self-destruct, all based on signals from neighbors. A decision that looks solitary is actually threaded through with community.
At the far edge of science, physicists whisper about particles that do not settle until observed, as if choice itself is written into the fabric of the universe. Decisions occur not in isolation, but in relation, even between the present and the past.
Closer to home, last week, thunder cracked as loud as I ever remember over the hill. The silence after was so deep. Just like the sky after all the rain looked even bluer. I learn that the silence after thunder is not just calm, but literally the atmosphere re-settling.
Science teaches most clearly: nature is interdependent, not independent. Decisions are not single points, but ripples. Not private, but shared. People say make a decision and then own it. Can we ever truly own a decision like we claim to own a dog? Reminds me of the people out there telling you to conquer a mountain that also is not yours.
And yet, in our own lives, we are praised for the trophies we win. We are commended for making our own decisions. Friends offer warnings: “No one can make this decision but you.” We are told independence is the higher ground. However, science reveals that nothing in nature operates independently. To imagine that the best decisions come in a vacuum is to misunderstand how life itself works.
How silly it would have sounded, long ago, to be told: make this decision all on your own. A village choosing where to move. A family deciding when to plant. A council decides when the water is safe to drink. Rarely was one left to decide alone, nor would they have wanted to be.
Just as decisions have shifted from shared to solitary, I see the same thing happening with privacy. When I asked my students what constitutes private information and what constitutes public information, they hesitated, unsure. Some said everything feels public now. Others shrugged. The idea of privacy itself seemed lost to them. And I thought: perhaps privacy has been chipped away in the same way communal decision-making has been lost. Stripped of both privacy and deep-rooted community, we are now islands where our choices belong to us alone, even when the consequences ripple out everywhere.
Hmm. No. We are not islands at all. Neither public nor private ones. We are strands in the same web, trembling on the same branch, deciding together whether we remember it or not. Hannah Arendt wrote that we live in a web of relationships, and it is through this web that meaning arises. Decisions, then, are not possessions, but threads.
The Quakers offer another way. They have something called a clearness committee. When someone faces a difficult decision, they do not sit alone with it. Instead, a circle gathers. Friends listen. They ask questions, not to sway or advise, but to help the person discover what they already carry inside. Clarity emerges not from isolation, but from trust in connection.
We forget we are nature. Clarity arises not from standing as a proud island, but from the quiet currents between people.
