The Walkman Effect
You can pretty much ignore everything if you want to. Except the bird.
Pretty much every year I go to the Aspen Ideas Festival, where I wander tent-to-tent sampling arguments about cancer research and longevity and AI and the future of higher education, running into people I’ve come to know and admire. David Brooks! Katie Couric! Friends of the podcast like Tig Notaro, Catherine Price, and so many more. (Also, the staff of the Aspen Ideas: Health are so kind and top notch that they always make it feel like a homecoming.)
It is a great deal of talking, but one morning it was simply too beautiful to be indoors so I signed up to go bird watching for the first time in my human life. You heard me! I was going to notice birds on purpose.
The scene was idyllic. Eight thousand feet up, the aspens were quaking. The sagebrush was rustling. And our guide looked like she’d been sent over from central casting: binoculars, a jaunty scarf, and an outfit of beige on beige on beige on beige. On a scale of enthusiasm, she had blown past the numbers entirely and now registered only as a series of exclamation marks. She had just come back from Aspen’s sister city in Argentina so attuned to birds that she’d recently shot out of bed at two in the morning, certain the Canada geese were migrating. They were. She stood there in her pajamas and watched them honk overhead.
Do you know the feeling when someone begins to share their wonder at the world, and you decide in that exact moment that you will never commit a single detail to memory? That was me, learning that an upsettingly boring number of birds are brown. That you can hear a hummingbird before you can see it, because it purrs like a wind-up toy. I had also fallen into step with an extremely likable gastroenterologist—author of the bestseller You’ve Been Pooping All Wrong—and had just started explaining that this was a subject I would sooner throw myself down a well than discuss, when we were shushed.
Look! Over there. A chickadee had built its nest in the soft rot of a nearby aspen, and the parents were fluttering back and forth, ferrying food to the baby’s open beak, which was marked at the back of the throat with a dot of yellow like a bull’s-eye. Feed here. And then there were shrieks. The baby had launched itself into the air! It was flying for the first time in its life—careening out of the tree, out into the whole waiting world—and it flew directly into the forehead of one of my fellow birders, where it promptly became tangled in her hair and her glasses. Everyone began screaming, I think. I just know that I was shouting and the professional birder was offering loud encouragement. Step away! The parents may not take it back now! Stop looking at it! The guide talked the woman into setting the bird gently on a low branch, and then made us all retreat, so the parents could find it and we could find more birds that were brown.
(I swear to you that this isn’t just another reductive set of solutions about “paying attention to the world” because I too am exhausted by the number of times someone attempts to solve me by yelling BE PRESENT.)
Before We Go Deeper…
It’s a privilege to write and support the Everything Happens community—and it’s also a lot of work that needs financial support to keep it sustainable.
Every month(ish), I will write a full-length essay for paid subscribers (and that’s today!). If you’re interested in supporting the work of this small-but-mighty team, your contribution helps make possible not only a special monthly space for you to reflect, but also our ability to offer everything else to the entire community for free, like our Everything Happens Book Club and blessings and curriculum for Advent and Lent. Thank you to everyone who contributes to make that possible.
And a friendly reminder: If you’d love to be here but a paid subscription isn’t possible right now for any reason, email hello@katebowler.com and tell us your favorite variety of potato chip, and we’ll happily give you a free subscription. No questions asked (other than those regarding potatoes, of course). Truly. It’s our joy to share.