January 25: Thoughts for the Day

Humans’ understanding of the world in which we live is restricted by our ability to comprehend things outside our realm of experience and beyond the limits of our imagination.  We understand how animals can feel pain because we understand, to some extent, how our own bodies work; we can see that animals react to pain stimuli in much the same way we do. We assume plants must not feel pain because their physical structures are so different from our own; they have no ‘nerves’ that we can identify.  Yet recent reports suggest plants react to external stimuli in ways that suggest they might ‘feel’ something akin to pain.  There is so much we don’t know, yet we often behave as if we know everything.  We should open our minds to the impossibly improbable.