Making eye contact with a lion is a seminal experience. You recognize you’re not invincible, even that you’re food. It’s the act of witnessing the absence of fear.

A lion looks at you for mere observation. It knows it can kill you, so you are of no consequence when you sit in your cage emitting metallic clicks. The lion is at rest, staying cool, so the situation is unthreatening. There’s no food or territory for cause of confrontation. So you don’t matter.

Alone in the bush, we are not at the top of the food chain. Almost everything out there can kill us. Many—Cape buffalo, hippos, rhinos—aren’t predators at all, but would kill us and leave us for the vultures.

It forces us to recalibrate our notions of how life works and puts the world into a more accurate perspective. It's a jarring awakening from our perceived "world order." We humans are very fond of ourselves and our accomplishments, and we tend to ignore or downplay our atrocities and failures. Look at our tall shiny buildings—they scrape the sky! Look at our digital information economy—people are paid for knowledge work, for further perpetuating our progress! Look at the Internet—we rapidly assimilate information globally!

None of this matters out in the bush. Looking into the eyes of a lion shows us that we are not the only species on this planet. That there is a natural global ecosystem, and that we’re not atop it, but one part of it. Looking into the eyes of a lion illuminates the magnificence of this world, the utter amazingness of our circumstances. We’re here, right now, living on a beautiful, diverse planet in the middle of apparent nothingness, among lions. And Japanese spider crabs, and okapi, and Venezuelan poodle moths.

Let’s stop destroying the one and only home we will ever know. Let’s stop to appreciate the complete absurdity of it all, the miraculous-ness of it all. Let’s embrace looking into the eyes of a lion.