The meaning of life as told by squirrels
Whilst working from home over autumn months, it became impossible to ignore a flurry of activity outside my window. Back and forth. To and fro. Up and down. Clipped, sharp movements scuttling across my line of sight at irregular intervals. Like an 8-bit video game, or stop-motion movie.
I started doubting myself. Was my mother right and had staring at that bloody computer screen finally made me start seeing things?
No. What I was seeing was real. It was just a bunch of these guys doing their thing.
Back when the leaves were changing colour, and slowly losing their personal battles with gravity, a clutch of squirrels began ferreting here, there, and everywhere burying their treasure: nuts.
It’s chaotic. There seems to be neither rhyme nor reason to it. A patch of soft ground is unearthed, a hidden parcel shoved within, followed by tiny paws ferociously patting the earth back down once more. Only to be repeated again a few feet further along. These marauding gangs work mercilessly across the autumn weeks. And it wasn’t long before the OCD part of my brain kept throwing the same question at me: how the hell are they going to find them again?
After the colder snaps of winter had taken grip, and a brief flurry of snow had come and gone, the little workers were back out; this time to reap the benefits of their Autumn efforts during harsher times.
The 8-bit movements resumed. One little digger, with a raggedy tail that looked like it had been dragged backwards through a bramble bush, raced from patch to patch, seemingly guided by his nose and a keen sense of willing, but little logic. After a few unsuccessful attempts of tearing up one small patch of turf after another to no avail, he was rewarded. I watched his small paws clutch powerfully onto his prize, before shoving his horde into his cheeks without hesitation.
And then the process resumed once more. Dig, move, dig, move, dig - cheek-shovel. I’ve watched that tail going about its work for a few days now. And I’ve come to realise that I’m not all that different from that squirrel.
I am a self-confessed geek when it comes to discovering new ideas, concepts or ways of looking at things. I flick from book to book, gather up articles from across the web via Twitter, LinkedIn or the news, and am generally willing to chat about any topic.
There’s little rhyme or reason as to how I approach my hobby in reality. These bits of information are loosely centred on topics or themes I am interested in - philosophy, psychology, human behaviour - but without a specific ordering to them. I try to make notes on a dozen or more different folders on my phone, scratches on pieces of paper, and unfinished thoughts captured on my laptop. But I haven’t yet been able to detail a thorough plan for how I’ll use them all. I occasionally berate myself for thinking that I should be more methodical about my gathering. And that is true, to an extent.
But there are still enough moments in my life when I’ll be out for a walk, or in the shower, or musing over a deliciously hoppy beer on a warm afternoon, when it feels like a few of those seemingly disparate thoughts come together.
A connection is made, as if out of nowhere, and an idea is formed. It may not be the best one. It’s unlikely to be sufficiently fully formed to satiate my appetite entirely. But it’s a nugget that keeps me going. It’s a small enough reward to serve as inspiration to carry on my efforts, hoping that in time they will lead me to a moment of fullness down the line.
I’ve learned that I like the squirrel approach to my ideas and hobbies. There are many areas in my life where it matters to be exact and precise. I take my exercise seriously, I follow recipes to the tee, I am a menace with a vacuum. But when it comes to my favourite hobby, the endless pursuit of novel ideas, I like to gather and scatter. I hide thoughts away to give myself a chance of potentially stumbling upon them later. And, in time, I’ll have a nose around to see what I can unearth. When I experience one of those little rewards, I’m always thankful for the version of myself that put that work in months before, leaving me something to discover later on.
Modern life fills us with deadlines, commitments, certainty. And in many cases that aids us. But what is the one area in your life when you can be more squirrel?
We don’t have to have everything planned out.
Serendipity is not just a fairly average film from the early 2000s where John Cusack proves he has the alluring power to captivate no matter the quality of the script. No, accidental discoveries allow us to make new connections and lead us to new places when it comes to our interests.
When I see a squirrel earnestly hard at work, knowing that they’re doing their best to plan for the future, but knowing it might not work out, I take solace from their efforts to keep trying anyway.
When I #see those little tails of activity buzzing about, it reminds that we don’t always have to solely focus on cultivating the perfect discovery when it comes to the things we enjoy. We should be encouraged to bury little nuggets of our interests and hobbies and dip into them from time to time with the hope we might discover something unexpected or new. We should become comfortable with this idea of ambiguity.
Get out there and scatter little treasures in the things you love. Say, you love the piano but can’t afford weekly lessons. Maybe you book in a lesson once a month, that’s the big prize. But every day you watch a YouTube video, or read a book, or practice the movements on a piece of paper. You scatter little efforts around your hobby in the hope that they’ll fall into place down the line.
Marcus Aurelius was one of the most famous Stoic philosophers who lived approximately 2,000 years ago.
The Stoics believed fervently in thinking carefully about what we can and can’t control in life. Doing this allows us to choose what we should and shouldn’t respond to. We can’t control if the lawnmowers of life might be booked for next Tuesday to uproot our efforts. Or if a thieving fellow squirrel might chance his paw to take advantage of our best laid plans. All we can do is keep upping the odds that, over the long term, we’re loading the dice in our favour. Through little moments and choices and allowing life to lead where it wants to go, we can subtly increase the chances that somewhere in the future, it’ll all pay off.
“You have to assemble your life yourself, action by action.”
Be more squirrel.
FOOTNOTE: The squirrel lobby is clearly a powerful underground entity, no pun intended. They have been hard at work beyond just gathering nuts. They’ve been deploying research efforts to state that the way the store and recover nuts is actually highly scientific.It turns out squirrels don’t lose anything like 50% of their horde, as some urban myths might have you believe. Some studies estimate they may recoup anything from between 75-95% of their stash. Which seems incredible, given the amount of nuts being buried by the number of squirrels in any given area. It turns out squirrels deploy a few processes to help jog their memories. One is called ‘spatial chunking’, meaning they put specific nuts in similar places to help them remember what nuts were where. For example, when given hazelnuts, almonds and other types, researchers observed squirrels burying each nut variety in a different place to help them remember where each was.Researchers have even witnessed the little critters trying to con their nearby onlookers with ‘deceptive caching’ - a process of pretending to bury a nut to throw off would-be furry thieves. Well played, squirrels. You may be fooling scientists that you’re actually a collection of storage masterminds. But I know you can’t recover all of your booty. I’ve seen the video you don’t want me to see. The one where your brother-in-digging is trying to hide a nut in a dog’s fur.