While walking down the street, I noticed a particular brown bag on the side of the road. Feeling a bit inquisitive (and bored), I decided to defer the journey in my current heading in order to steal a glimpse of this curious foreign object. It wasn’t until I came within a meter of it that the details, and the smell, became clear to me. It was a squirrel, no doubt a victim of an ill-fated accident with a motor vehicle. Without rational thought, I decided to pick up a nearby branch, and poke at the corpse.
As I continued to prod it with my stick, a thought came into my head. Why was I doing this? Certainly, this squirrel was already deceased. There’s no reason for it to pick its head up and run off. Perhaps, I jokingly thought, this stick would give the squirrel energy and he would come back to life, like a grotesque zombie in a horror show. I recognize now that I was not jabbing it to reenact Frankenstein, but rather to sense its texture and its weight.
However, this persistent nudging of the perished animal led me to think: why do we as human beings not poke things more often? It is fascinating how such a brief stop and such a simple action has allowed me to gain a respectable experience in my life, as I have been engrossed in the delicacy of its fur, the muscles in its still warm body, and moreover, the fleeting concept of death. It is one thing to look: we only see what is on the outside. It is another to poke: we can feel its elaborate surface.
Why do we forget to see and feel? We walk past random objects every day, unwilling to stop from our current paths for a moment and take a prod at it. When we neglect, details become forgotten and blurred: without taking a break from our journeys, we would never know about the bag that was a squirrel, or perhaps the paper that is a winning lottery ticket or the man who is a long-lost friend. Specifics are lost, and when they are lost, we miss things, beautiful things, which may possibly not be experienced again in a lifetime.
But what reason do we have to stop? Is it not a waste of time? Indeed, when we wander through roads, streets, and alleys alone, we find that we are people of haste. This isn’t our fault, though. Current society has rushed us to meet strict deadlines and meeting times, to the extent that we have been involuntary compelled to view a destination and not its path. We don’t have the luxury to see the thing, much less to feel it. Thus we are forced to walk quickly, never stopping once to look to the side, or examine something in its fine, intricate aspects.
So here’s a challenge for you: no matter where you are, no matter how much time you have, when you see something, stop. Take a stick and poke at it. Who knows? Maybe you’ll find something that may change your own view of overlooked objects.
