New Year's Eve, and this afternoon was my last daily walk of 2020. Across the UW campus. Enjoying the sun's attempt to break through the clouds. The tall trees, now free of leaves, stretching their skeletal arms up to the sky. The ducks swimming on Frosh Pond, the Canada geese who've decided not to fly home.
Twenty-twenty. It's all been said, in essays, blogs, news columns, jokes, cartoons, comics. The year that nobody wanted. The year that forms a hollow place in the stories of our lives. The year of pandemic, of racial unrest, of the president who didn't know when to let go.
But I come not to discuss 2020 but to bury it. On to 2021. Will it be better? The stock market seems to think so, and they're never wrong, right? We'll have effective vaccines, we'll have a new president, we'll have a blank slate on which to write a new story. Let's hope for the best.
But a new year means resolutions. My resolution is simple: to pay attention. Attention to the people around me, certainly, but -- even more -- attention to the beauties and curiosities of the physical world in which I live. A resolution that I've made -- mentally, if not in writing -- in past years, but it's worth working on it again.
I'm reading a book entitled The Diary of a Young Naturalist, from which my opening quotation is taken. The author, Dara McAnulty, is a 16-year-old boy in Northern Ireland. His book is drawn from a diary he kept the year he was 14. McAnulty is autistic. He is a devoted naturalist. And he is a beautiful and self-aware writer, beautiful and self-aware not just for a teenager but for anyone of any age.
You can safely anticipate my book review once I've finished the book. But I mention him in connection with my resolution because of his ability, his joy, in focusing on the natural phenomena about him. Birds, of course. But flowers, trees, plants of every kind. Insects. The tactile feel of grass, of tree bark, of the soil itself. He understands his autism, and how it makes it difficult for him to relate to other people -- difficult, but not impossible. But he substitutes for the pleasures of human relations his ability to focus on nature, an ability which few of us possess.
We are not as capable as he, perhaps, but we are capable of far more attention to the natural world than we actually give it. Even those of us who consider ourselves lovers of nature sometimes prefer our nature sanitized and romanticized:
People just seemed to enjoy nature from a distance; cherry blossom or autumn leaves were beautiful on trees, where they belonged, but not so great when they fell all damp and leathery to the ground, onto lawns or school playgrounds. Snails were an abomination. Foxes were vermin, badgers were dangerous. All these strange ideas spun round me like a spider's web, until I was entombed.
We can't all be naturalists, obviously. We can't all love dead leaves and snails. But we can pay attention, pay attention to our surroundings just as we pay attention to sports scores. And when I say "we," I mean "me." Being intrigued by nature isn't a moral imperative. It's simply something I think I should make a greater attempt to do, because doing so would fit in so clearly with my own less well defined interests and aesthetic concerns.
Will I be kinder, more interested and understanding, the next time a raccoon strolls in through my cat door? Will I continue rooting out my dandelions after reading how dependent the first bees of the season are on dandelion nectar? I guess those will be early tests of my sincerity.
Happy New Year!
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