This morning, there was a haunting cry overhead that is not often heard over this way. It caused me to look upward somewhat absent mindedly, being otherwise engaged, chuckling at the sight of one of the cats. She was mostly hidden by a bush in ‘hunting’ mode, her expression clearly saying that I had become entirely irrelevant to her life; until hunger next struck of course.
“Is that one of the local nesting kestrels?”, I heard excitedly from next to me, at which point it hit home that we were witnessing something similarly remarkable. It had the larger silhouette of a buzzard, it’s flight pattern as majestic as anything that I have ever witnessed, with spectacular markings on its wings and accompanied by a family of 3. It is just possible that Birmingham’s ‘Bin-mageddon’ has helped local birds of prey to thrive; an unexpected silver lining to an otherwise sorry tale.
Things that give us a childish sense of anticipation are so important to us as burnt out adults. Lately, I’ve also felt this way before tuning into Radio 4; listening to podcasts, or enjoying narrated stories recommended to me by a good friend in Wales. I love being entertained by incredibly funny, articulate and appealing characters that inhabit shows like ‘Just a Minute’ or ‘The News Quiz’ or by informative programmes that ‘gatecrash’ fascinating lives and the remarkable people that live them. Or being swept along by magical tales written by master storytellers, being drawn inexorably into an imaginary world, by narrators whose warm voices envelop you as a blanket. One can only imagine that they were hugged an awful lot as children.
Immersing yourself in these ‘other worlds’ has the ability to change the landscape in your head, rewriting the script of your thoughts, if you will. Without these, or other effective distractions, some of us have a tendency to get bogged down by our aches and pains and in my case, to also ‘think too much’.
“At last, you’re admitting it”, interrupts the part of my brain that represents my friends. A few have pointed this out in the past, much to my consternation.
“I only have a problem when you don’t see how it benefits nearly every one of you, except me”, I inwardly point out, defensively sulking.
This ‘overthinking’ comes in part from many years worth of studying and cramming of dry reading material for exams, academic expectations born out of a classroom culture where compassion and a wonder of the world were given negligible value in comparison. We learn to associate with our minds, forgetting to fully experience these incredible bodies that are a part of the ‘package.’ It is as if they are simply a mechanism by which we transport our thoughts and senses around, which must be exercised and fed from time to time. Ironically, a bit like caring for a pet!
I started out as one of those dreamy and unfocused kids who, along with the class jack-in-a-boxes, were the bain of our teacher’s lives (or so you’d think, judging from our school reports). It’s possible that most of us ‘rebels’ wanted to be outside climbing trees, bare footed and enjoying the wind in our hair, only we never got to swap notes. So we never got to validate each other. Maybe the mini-adventures inhabiting this blog, although a poor attempt at ‘wanderlust’, are helping to fulfill a lifetime’s yearning to ‘catch up’. I do believe though, that the day most of us learned to conform and ‘behave acceptably, is not the proud victory that our parents believed it to be.
This is summed up by a wise dude who lived a ridiculously long time ago in both Ancient Greece & Rome:
“The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.” ― Plutarch
