Klein and Updegraff, Tools for Engagement:
It’s necessary, absolutely necessary, for us to first recognize that it’s good to be human—inefficiencies, blunders, and all. We are not machines, nor should we desire to be. This means taking a strong stand against what author Wendell Berry describes as “our slovenly willingness to allow machines and the idea of the machine to prescribe the terms and conditions of the lives of creatures, which we have allowed increasingly for the last two centuries, and are still allowing, at an incalculable cost to other creatures and to ourselves.” Berry goes further: “We should banish from our speech and writing any use of the word ‘machine’ as an explanation or definition of anything that is not a machine. Our understanding of creatures and our use of them are not improved by calling them machines.”
Rather than regard ourselves as biological mechanisms calibrated to efficiency and expediency, it would be better to think of ourselves as trees who anchor our roots in the earth yet reach our branches up into the heavens. This metaphor invites us to think of our work in terms of fruitfulness rather than output. As a tree slowly, imperceptibly, organically adds layers of depth and rooted strength as it matures to production, so we too grow imperceptibly over time and through experience. We have times of rest and restoration, times of leafing out, and times of pruning. And the end result of this quiet, patient process is a crown laden with good things to share: apples, acorns, peaches. This is the model of human life and work that our culture desperately needs to recover, because it is the very way that we will acquire the ability to express ourselves creatively and competently.
As Donna Haraway has said, it matters what thoughts we think with.