Blog #106. Variation—Nature’s Curiosity and Wonder

Over the past few weeks, we have been exploring what women can learn from Charles Darwin’s principles of evolution as we age in power.

First came adaptation. Adaptation is what happens when we notice that something which once worked beautifully no longer fits the environment we are living in now. Sometimes it is a role that once defined us. Sometimes it is a routine that once energized us. Adaptation is recalibration. It is the wisdom to adjust the sails when the winds change.

What's your preferred variation?

Then we explored natural selection. Natural selection is the filter because life constantly edits. Some environments nourish us. Others slowly drain us. Evolution asks a deceptively simple question: What actually fits now?

Darwin’s work revealed something simple and profound: life evolves through a handful of repeating patterns. Something shifts, and we begin asking deeper questions about what comes next. By the time we reach our third chapter, we begin choosing differently. Less out of obligation. More out of alignment.

But adaptation and natural selection do not start the evolutionary process. They respond to it. Evolution begins somewhere else. It begins with variation.

In the natural world, variation is constant. Seeds sprout in slightly different ways. Birds are born with slightly different beaks. Flowers appear in slightly different shapes or colors. Most of those differences lead nowhere. They simply exist.

But occasionally one of those variations turns out to be useful. It allows the organism to thrive in its particular environment. When that happens, natural selection favors it. Over time, adaptation builds upon it.

Life stays alive by producing options. If everything we do is optimized, efficient, and predictable, our lives may run smoothly—but they stop generating new possibilities. Variation reopens the field.

Variation is curiosity and wonder—the willingness to try something without needing to know exactly where it will lead.

Here is where women in our third chapter have a quiet advantage. We have lived long enough to know that not everything has to turn into something. Some experiences are simply part of how life gathers information.

This week, try your own evolutionary experiment. Do something familiar — in two different ways.

Remember the Julia Roberts movie Runaway Bride? There’s a scene where she realizes she doesn’t actually know how she likes her eggs because she has always eaten them the way the man she was dating preferred them.

So she starts trying them differently. That’s variation.

Choose one thing this week and try it two ways. Walk alone one day and with a friend the next. Work on a project for thirty minutes one day and an hour the next. Then notice: Where did your energy lift? Where did curiosity spark? That’s information. Evolution runs on information.

Sometimes the next version of your life begins with something as simple as discovering how you like your eggs.

So go ahead. Run a small experiment. You might be surprised by what you discover about yourself.