A Nanosecond in the Cosmos

I like to go back to this idea about the capacity of nature to inspire awe. It's a reminder that while we are connected to all of the living systems on the planet, we are only a tiny part, and we've been in the cosmos only for a nanosecond. Astronomers have recently detected what they believe are two black holes colliding in a distant region of the universe, billions of light years beyond our own. Around five billion light years away — so the light we're seeing now left before the Earth itself had even formed, long before dinosaurs walked here. And dinosaurs lasted 165 million years.

Leadership, true leadership, is about humility, I think. Awe comes through a discovery like the black hole collision, yet it also comes through something quite small, like studying a flower or a fungus, and marvelling at the constructions and design of nature. The other thing nature teaches is resilience, an important characteristic for a leader. A daily walk through a park is a lesson in the incredible toughness and endurance of nature: how roots spread further underground in search of water, how plants and systems adapt to changing conditions. And then, finally, vulnerability: ours as members of the human race, and nature's as a living system supporting all human and non-human species.

Nature constantly reminds us that we are all in this together, and just as scholar and novelist Theodore Roszak — who coined the term ecopsychology — wrote, "the needs of the planet are the needs of the person, the rights of the person are the rights of the planet."