« Life Costs »
Wednesday, October 19, 2011 On a dog walk, I notice a black-and-orange woolly caterpillar (fearlessly) plowing through a lawn of grass. No machete, just pure self-directed locomotion towards a goal I cannot fathom. Its glistening black face is just like the wet nose of my German shepherd.
I take my dog off the leash and toss it a stick to keep it away from the sphere of my curiosity. I squat down to watch this little mammoth-of-an-arrow tumble up and down through the jungle of grass.
Starts drizzling. My dog comes up to check in with me to see if we are ready to move on and - of course - tramples on the caterpillar. I feel bad. I want to know if the caterpillar is still alive. I pick up a small stick to check for vital signs. As I am about to do this I clearly understand that my desire to know may, in fact, finish off the caterpillar.
The creature is motionless, either dead or in adaptive paralysis. If it's alive and waiting out the danger, then all's fine. If it's dead, it's dead. If it's alive and I poke it with a stick to see if it stirs I just might injure it. Choice is clear: leave the scene. But the curiosity prevails and I poke the beast: it is alive and responds by coiling into a defensive ouroboros. I feel bad. This time I accept my emotional predicament and leave.
The following lesson-learned rationalization occurs to me as I walk away: "Change the variables, dial up the intensity and you've got here the making of a Shakespearean tragedy - the painful zero-sum, subject-object interplay of co-existence."
I realize: "Paying attention costs. Attention is engagement. Engagement is interference. Interference costs. Paying attention always costs someone some kind of something."
On the way home, I settle into a zen-style metacognitive nonchalance to watch a series of guilt associations pass through my mind. As my mind clears, a guy pulls up in a red SUV: "Excuse me, sir, have you happened to see a black lab run through here?" I shake my head: "No, sorry."
Not paying attention costs too.
Life always costs someone some kind of something. Pay the price of attention, in full.