…I ask my dog
to tell me
a story, and she
never hesitates.
“Once upon
a time,” she says,
“a woman lived
with a simply
wonderful dog…” and
she stops talking.
“Is that all?”
I ask her.
“Yes,” she says,
“Why do you ask?
Isn’t it enough?”
Mailbox‽
This morning, my friend looked out our window and said “There’s a mailbox, right across the street!”
“What‽ Let me see!” I said, not believing I could have missed this.
Sure enough, in the shadows, but still fairly obvious was a mailbox neither of us had noticed the entire past year. The half-mile walks I’d been taking to what I thought was the nearest mailbox had been a waste of my time, extra exercise for me, or a wakeup call for my awareness, depending on how I want to see it.
I’m writing about and advocating for knowing where you live so well that you don’t miss potentially important details, as we did with the mailbox situation. If you make a habit of noticing patterns and anomalies in your everyday surroundings, your conscious and subconscious processes will collaborate on this duty, helping to alert you to things of potential interest, danger, or just sheer fun.
About Collaboration…
Another friend mentioned yesterday how she thinks it’s strange that numerous organizations provide the same or largely overlapping services to various populations, yet they do not collaborate as much as you might think they could. Like us as individuals but on a larger scale, they aren’t noticing the mailbox (or organizations ) just across the street, along with the potential for increased efficiency and effectiveness in the work they do.
You Are wHere?
If someone took a picture of any area within a half block of where you live and mixed it in with other similar type pictures from distant places, could you identify the snapshot from where you live?
Many people would likely fail to do so, and that failure is a symptom of our detachment from the areas we live in. Richard Louv writes about this increasing lack of connection to our natural surroundings in youth in his book Last Child in the Woods; see the corresponding article in the San Francisco Chronicle. Youth aren’t the only ones; most of us are more skilled at finding our way around the television schedule or recognizing grocery store products than we are at noticing details of our outdoor surroundings-and the point here is not that being able to shop for groceries competently isn’t a worthwhile skill, Unit Prices people!
Try noticing a few new things each day about places and people you think you’re already familiar with. You never know when the ability to observe changes in your environment might be useful or even crucial. If nothing else, you will be a more informed person.
Dogs, Headphones, et cetera
All living creatures, including ourselves, have different perceptions of the same environment based on how they’ve evolved to protect themselves, find food, and reproduce over millions of years. One example is that winged creatures (also creatures who are preyed upon by winged creatures!) such as birds are usually more aware of what goes on in the sky than humans are. Crows will sound alerts for approaching raptors way before a person might notice them. Then they will draw attention to a predator in their territory by mobbing the individual, an effective harassment technique which often leads to the hawk, eagle, or other predator swiftly leaving the area.
Although there is debate on the accuracy of animal warnings about impending natural disasters, it has been reported that animals often act strangely before approaching storms or other severe environmental changes. Prior to the recent devastating earthquake in Sichuan, China, unusual animal behaviors were noticed as early as a few days before the quake.
Like people, other animals have differences in their sensory abilities and reactions to things, which at least partially explains differences and lack of uniformity in responses. As with humans, there aren’t this or that behaviors. Rather, behavior patterns occur within an ever-changing continuum and the more you know the patterns of a continuum, the more useful that knowledge is to you.
Just because all dogs don’t flip out and start acting weird before every bad storm or earthquake doesn’t mean that some or even many dogs and other animals cannot reliably sense the approach of these things. If other animals around you start acting weird, similar past behaviors tell us that, depending on where you live, an earthquake, tornado, tsunami, or something else that might be important to you could soon be approaching. You might as well stay sharp, be ready, and extend your senses beyond your usual filtering-out mechanisms. Most of the time our filtering-out abilities are necessary so that we are not overwhelmed with too many perceptions at once. In some cases though, we have to know how to open up, perceive new things, and alter our behaviors accordingly.
We patronize animals for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourslves in the net of life, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth. – Henry Beston
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