One day my daughters and I were having a conversation about how many owls you’d need to see in one day before you started to get concerned.
It’s not important how this discussion began. This is just one of those things that comes with having children who are curious and a little insane. Kids don’t really do small talk. You’re sitting down to dinner and someone asks, with a real sense of urgency, if not tucking your shirt into your pants necessarily means that your pants are tucked into your shirt. Then the conversation is off and running.
Anyway, owls. Imagine you’re up early taking the dog for a walk and you see one up in a tree. A pretty rare thing, depending on where you live, but by no means unprecedented. Owls are out there. We know this. They have to get seen sometimes.
(The fuck are you looking at, brah.)
But then later you’re on your lunch break and there’s another one. Different color. Different owl. Maybe this one is sleeping the daylight away but it’s definitely there. That’s two owls in one day. Little weird, right?
So how many owls before you start to think something is going on? Mind you, for the sake of this scenario the owls aren’t actually doing anything out of the ordinary. They’re just hanging out, doing owl things. But now you keep seeing them. Separately. Each viewing is a wholly distinct incident. At some point you’re probably going to conclude that something is up.
For the record, my answer was three (3) owls. That’s when I decide that either the owls are amassing troops at the borders of humanity in preparation for an invasion, or it is a portent aimed at me specifically, telling me this is the day I die.
Willa, my oldest daughter, said seven owls. That seems like an incredible number of owl sightings to initially chalk up to coincidence (you’re saying after five, six owls you’re just going, ‘huh there’s another one!') but fine.
Joey, my youngest daughter, said she’d be so excited about seeing the owls that she probably wouldn’t even count them. This, of course, is the way to be. To look around at the world and always see wonder rather than reasons for worry. Think about how much happier you’d be. And, honestly, probably not any less prepared in any way that matters.
As a natural worrier, this is something I think about a lot. At times I have told myself that my tendency toward anxiety about the future has also made me good at planning for all possible scenarios. I still think this is at least partially true. I’m pretty good with money, as in saving it. Even when I’ve been suddenly “laid off” (the modern economy’s term for when you get fired for reasons beyond your control), I always had back-up plans and back-ups to the back-ups. That’s because I worried this day would come, and so I planned for it.
I never miss flights because I always worry that I’ll miss flights. I have jumper cables in my car but it’s almost never my car that’s in need of a jumpstart. Right now I’ve got some food and water and ammunition in my basement – not an insane amount, but enough to sleep soundly – just so that even total societal collapse doesn’t catch me unawares.
I remember listening to the big homie Patrick Wyman’s amazing Tides of History podcast in which he very ambitiously charted the story of humanity from the rise of the first hominids to the civilizations of the Bronze Age. He noted that anthropologists had found stone tools crafted by some nomadic hominids that seemed to have been purposely left in the areas where they expected to need them. If you have a special rock for scraping meat off the bone of a dead animal, for instance, you might rather stash that thing near the spot where you typically find dead animals rather than carrying it with you all across the grasslands of Africa.
This is one of the things that sets hominids apart, the Good Doctor Wyman pointed out. We are the animal that plans. (OK, certain other animals plan too. But there’s probably a difference between an instinctual hoarding of nuts in advance of the winter and devising solutions for problems that haven’t ever happened yet.)
Point is, humans have a long history of trying to divine and therefore prepare for the vast and unknowable future. Ancient peoples thought they could tell the future by looking at goat entrails or the movements of swallows. A bunch of civilizations had complicated theories about comets and what they meant. Some even thought that the specifics of the comet’s tail gave you detailed information. Two tails meant political instability and war. Three meant famine and disease. And so on.
Notice here that rarely did anyone see these comets and even consider the possibility that they might mean something good. That’s just generally not how humans are wired. We don’t feel the earth tremble and immediately assume that the gods are pleased with us.
We’re also so self-absorbed and arrogant, though, that we’re generally pretty likely to assume that whatever is happening either here or in the night sky, it must have something to do with us. As scary as those comets seem when you think they’re warning of impending doom, it’s a different kind of sorrow to accept that, like almost everything else that exists in the entirety of the universe, they don’t even know you’re there.
There’s a line from the Norwegian film “The Worst Person In The World” (which I totally recommend) where a character who’s dying of cancer says, in a moment of self-reflection: “I always worried something would go wrong. But the things that went wrong were never what I worried about.”
As humans, we’re not great with unknowns. We can’t watch the sun move across the sky each day and accept that we don’t know how or why. We would much rather make up a story about a cosmic chariot and be hilariously wrong than admit we have no fucking clue what’s going on. So it makes sense that, when it comes to the future, we feel like we always need to guess what’s coming.
The problem is that a) we usually have very limited information on which to base these guesses, and b) a lot of the bad shit that happens to us is stuff that we can only do so much about. Worrying about the cancer isn’t going to stop it. Even if it prods you to get regular screenings, it won’t stop you from getting hit by a bus on the way home. At a certain point (and that point is probably much earlier in the process than we’d like to believe) the worrying becomes more damaging to us than a total lack of preparedness would have been. And that’s even assuming that the thing we’re worrying about was anything real that we could plan and prepare for. Here, this chart illustrates it better than I can:
What I’m saying is, seeing all those owls would be pretty great as long as you could get yourself to accept that you don’t know what it means and there’s a very good chance it doesn’t mean a damn thing. If you can get there, then each owl is just a majestic creature you’re lucky enough to witness during your indefinite time as a sentient bag of meat and water hurtling through space. Imagine wasting that experience worrying about what it means for you personally. Especially when you’re going to die anyway.
It’s like Louise Glück’s poem “A Theory Of Memory,” in which she recalls being a child and going to a fortune-teller who examined her palm and told her that she was once a ruler uniting a divided land:
Great things, she said, are ahead of you, or perhaps behind you; it is difficult to be sure. And yet, she added, what is the difference? Right now you are a child holding hands with a fortune-teller. All the rest is hypothesis and dream.