Читать книгу Life at DrTom's: Mostly Humorous Anecdotes by a Mostly Retired Cornell Professor - Thomas A. Gavin - Страница 4

There is a lesson to be learned in nearly everything we do. Now that I am retired, I have the time to reveal and ponder what those “morals of the story” are. Regardless of whether you are planting a garden, sitting in a bar alone, cutting firewood, observing chickadees at a bird feeder, or reading what people write on a social networking website, observing human and non-human life can be entertaining, provocative, and humorous. When you are not hard-pressed by deadlines and goals imposed from the outside, you can savor the little pleasures more and, with time, you realize that these are really the important pleasures. I now spend a great deal more time with cigar books and cookbooks and Hemingway than I do with bird books and ecology books and Darwin. Oh, how our lives can change.

I was a university professor for nearly 30 years---conservation biology, behavioral ecology, mammalogy, ornithology, ecology. It is impossible for my view of the world not to reflect what I learned from all that time spent looking at nature as a product of natural selection and the evolutionary process. Humans are basically little different than other mammals, except we carry cell phones. But observing people is easier than watching other animals, and it can be done anywhere. Fortunately, humans are not strictly nocturnal and we don’t live in a hole in the ground.

This book focuses on the idea embodied in that old expression about taking the time to smell the flowers as you go through life. The natural world is intensely rich; there are hundreds of biological stories unfolding around each of us every day. But you have to slow down and tune your senses to hear their messages. Exactly the same is true for the human story. I’m not here to advise or instruct anyone about how to slow down and savor the world more. You probably have a thousand reasons why you can not do that. However, I can share with you some experiences, most of them from the past few years. If this works out well, these anecdotes might cause you to sit outside in a forest, or in a public place with the cell phone off, just absorbing what comes at you.

This book is a collection of my recent essays, many of which originally appeared in my Life at DrTom’s blog. They have been rewritten, expanded, and shaped to focus on what life can teach us if we really observe. Watching and listening are the techniques, and the memories that result is the goal.