Learning is a bottomless pit, love is a bottomless pit, and if you’ve really studied, loved, and lived with all your might, you never really tick an item on your list or dig a bucket. You pass it on.
Many people have what they call a “wish list” – a list of things that they want to happen to each other in their lifetime. Most of the ones I’ve heard about are places to go. I think it is normal to have a wish list, but I could never understand why it is called a “wish list”. Why do you think of the things you want to happen in your life as “items” that you can carry in a bucket? What will you do with them after filling? Where are you going to go with that bucket? I think it’s depressing to think that life is all about filling a bucket just to finally kick it.
When I ran away decades ago, my husband and I were researching the chances of our extraordinary bond, and chances were we knew we would be together for no more than 10-12 years. I know that many, if not most, married couples begin to live with the term “forever.” He and I were very close and we wanted “forever” to be an option, but in times when we want our thoughts to withstand the control of a day that was much more frequent, he and I were very much aware of the life cycles of ours and other creatures “. So we thought we’d make a list of the things we wanted to learn together. It was the “List for Learning Together” or “LTL”. Not as sexy as a bucket list, but if you stay with me, maybe I can convince you to create your own LTL.
One of the things on our list was getting to know animals. At first, it wasn’t about loving animals. Actually, it was about why we didn’t love them, and that worried both of us. He and I had a strange habit of backing off and realizing that we were one species among millions of others caught in this troublesome, joyful living planetary maze. This habit served as our “refuge” from the guilt that we humans dominate all other species, but moreover, it also served as an indisputable reminder that there are millions of other ways to live.
To mark “learn about animals” on our list, it wasn’t just about going one place, watching the animals, talking to experts who research them throughout their lives, or just reading books about them. All this and more. We wanted to learn “natural selection” – the incredibly deep insight Charles Darwin had about how natural life creatively produces life of different strength in different generations and places. So we had to give up buying furniture and go with the scientists on a trip to the Galapagos. When we went there, not only did we observe how natural selection actually made a lot of sense and explained many things about the progression of biological life, but we also gained lasting respect for everything wild and raw.
We were more and more fascinated by the “otherness” of inhuman creatures and felt electrified when we made contact with these “others”. We read a lot of books about animals and had a lot of exciting conversations with scientists who have devoted a large part of their lives to researching them. He and I exchanged our own admiration and perplexity about what we had come across in these other lives. We constantly realized that we all live in a huge 40,075 km house on the planet with tons of other living things, and most people don’t even realize (or at least they do) that being human is just one way of being alive.
Fast forward as I read the wonderful book by science writer Ed Yong: An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realm Around Us. Many years have passed since my husband died, and he has died 12 years since we started our life together, as he calculated. I found myself telling him in my mind that I had just found out that salmon can sense their way into the waters where they were born, that elephants can find water buried in them, and that the smell that the bucket covered contained more food, that The movement of ants troops are so dependent on pheromones that if the pheromones stick to each other, fatigue will spiral to death, and the forked tongue of snakes has to do with having a stereophonic way of sensing direction, when each “spike” captures the smell from all sides, that the bees can simply stand on the flower to detect the sweetness of its nectar, that the catfish has taste buds all over its scaleless membrane from head to tail.
I remember “learn about animals” on our list and that we never really marked it, even after all the adventures we devoted to them. I think it’s because we already realized then that learning something is a bottomless pit. This love is a bottomless pit. And this life is also a bottomless abyss, because the way he loved and studied with me was on my list of life, which I now share with those with whom I am adventurous.
If you’ve really studied, loved, and lived with all your might, you never really tick an item on your list and dig a bucket. You pass it on. – Rappler.com
Maria Isabel Garcia is a science writer. She has written two books: Science Solitaire and Twenty-One Grams of Spirit and Seven ounces of Lust. You can contact her at sciencesolitaire@gmail.com.
