Perfect Like That
Seeing worlds
PRIVATE TEACHING | CALENDAR | PODCAST | WRITING
A common prairie cow sees both the future approaching and the past slipping away. Their visual field wraps almost entirely around their heads, which means they can meander over a grassy slope and watch the barn they’ve just left receding in the distance, and simultaneously keep an eye on that tasty patch of alfalfa up ahead. I’m trying hard to imagine what it must be like to see the world in this way, but I’m having a hard time. It’d be hard in the best of circumstances but it’s especially hard now, when I’m sandwiched between a City Tour bus and a long line of cars, and all I can see is the butt of the bus stopped bumper to nose in front of me. I’ve been sitting here for a while now, so I’ve had plenty of time to examine the neon red rear of the bus with its taped-on white and blue balloons and the hand-drawn names of the high school seniors spilling out of its windows. They’re all cheering and laughing and snapping selfies, as are the beaming parents milling in the middle of the street and around the tightly parked cars stretching behind me all the way to the avenue.
K had warned me about the caravans the day before. High school seniors and their parents take to the streets on the first day of class, their decorated cars’ lights flashing and horns honking to mark the start of their last year in school. Cute, I thought as I grabbed my keys and headed out the door—early, I thought—for my PT appointment. But not early enough, for the moment I rolled out of my building’s parking garage I was squeezed between the bus and the cars, and now I was sitting in the middle of the party and trying not to seethe.
I was surprised, I have to admit, at how quickly I became impatient once I started driving in Panama City traffic. For the last couple of decades I’d driven very little and mostly on country roads, so I’d forgotten about the peculiar transformation one undergoes when stuck in a small steel capsule surrounded by many, many others like it. Except this time, stuck with myself in that narrow space (narrow inside and outside), I was able to catch the first flare of irritation in my body as it appeared. I mean, I really saw it. First I felt the urge to jump out of the car to convince someone to get things moving. Then I saw the thought that accompanied the feeling as clearly if it were projected on a screen in front of me: “Who the hell do they think they are?” The implication, though unvoiced, was also clear. What makes them think they’re more important than me and my needs? Then I felt myself cringe. Apparently even after decades of Zen practice some part of me still thinks the world should revolve around me. Then I started thinking about the cows, and things began to shift.
I’d been reading a book about animal perception, and about the wildly different worlds, or Umwelten, each species inhabits based on those perceptions. If cows have surround vision, chickens see in stereo. One eye can scan the ground for grubs while the other keeps a lookout for predators. Chameleons rotate their eyes independently of each other, hummingbirds see colors invisible to us—mixtures of green, yellow, red, and purple with UV light. By contrast, I see colors only within the visible spectrum, objects in front of my eyes but not behind, and can hold in focus just one of these at a time. That would all be fine if it wasn’t for another limitation we humans have, what I think is the real kicker. Because everything I see I filter through my all-pervasive sense of self as the locus of experience, I’m convinced that everything that happens, happens to me. At least, everything that matters since, from this perspective, whatever doesn’t serve me I don’t even see. It simply doesn’t exist for me.
What an impoverished view of the world, I think as I sit in my car. What a dangerous view. All the hurt we inflict on one another can be traced back to some version of this belief that life, the world, other beings exist for me, for my benefit. I don’t walk around thinking this explicitly, but the thought is buried deep within and it comes out in my interactions with others cloaked as impatience, as irritation. It’s the same thought that, unchecked, easily turns into violence, as it does so often in our world.
That Monday morning, I wasn’t about to punch anyone to get to my PT appointment. But I saw the chain unfold before my eyes so clearly that it stopped me. That’s when I looked up and saw on the sidewalk one of the mothers waving at her teenager on the bus. She was holding her phone in one hand, snapping pictures, while with the other she waved and waved, beaming. She was bursting with pride for her kid, and only for an instant, I saw what she saw: a busful of kids, also bursting at the seams with pride for having gotten this far—only one more year and then college, maybe here in the city, maybe on the other side of the world, why not? In the meantime, maybe all of us could work to see a little of what a cow sees. We could take stock of where we’d been and use what we saw to make good choices about where we were headed. And we could work to let our vision expand to take in more of the world, not just what’s in front of our eyes but also what we easily miss when we’re focused on our own wants. That’s what I wished for them, anyway, and for myself in every moment.
Eventually, the kids filed out of the bus and into their school and the parents slowly drove away, balloons waving in the breeze. I got to my appointment on time and when I came out, the sky was unusually clear, an unbroken swath of cerulean blue with a single tiny cloud in the middle in the shape of an apostrophe. Smooth sailing on the way back home too, no traffic anywhere, despite the first day of school. Some days are just perfect like that.
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