Squirrels
There is a Saturday Night Live sketch* (featuring Adam Sandler) about a travel agency who takes tourists around Italy. The agency, Romano Tours, wants to manage expectations for its guests and so the Sandler character, Joe Romano, speaks frankly: “Our tours will take you to the most beautiful places on earth. But remember: You’re still going to be you on vacation. I want to be very clear about what we can and cannot do. We can take you on a hike. We cannot turn you into someone who likes hiking.”
I thought of this SNL sketch on our recent trip to Alaska. After an afternoon spent kayaking around the bay, I found myself creating a whole narrative about my imagined life in a little Alaskan coastal town. I would own a kayak. I’d go to yoga classes, walk on the beach every morning, fill my freezer with salmon. I could learn to cross-country ski.. Grow dahlias. Own binoculars. I would drive a four-wheel drive truck with a trailer and go on adventures across the vast wilderness with my big dog.
And then I remember: I am a cat person who doesn’t like camping. Lately I have been thinking about what motivates us to travel, and what we choose to do when we get there. I wonder about the compulsion to seek out new surroundings only to do exactly what we do back home (yoga, read, needlepoint, go on walks) once we get there. And yet the conviction that travel could change us, turn us into someone new is so compelling. If we were just there, in that exotic spot, we’d be a whole different person. You are still you, Joe Romano reminds his guests. We can take you to the Italian Riviera. We cannot make you comfortable in a bathing suit.
It is easy to get caught up in the romantic idea of something and ignore the practical details required. Sleeping under the stars sounds amazing, but then there’s the lack of indoor plumbing. Learning to play the piano means practice boxes. A regular meditation practice also includes getting oneself to the Zen center for early morning Zazen. Clean floors involve the chore of sweeping one’s floors. Having a garden equals weeding. And watering. Translation: You Garden.
Of course, it isn’t just travel that seduces us into magical thinking. Our closets and basements are full of the forgotten gear of abandoned hobbies and lives left behind. For that five minutes ten years ago, we were absolutely going to learn to bake bread and grow orchids, play tennis and take up the ukulele, hence the bread machine, fancy fertilizers, tennis rackets and musical instruments cluttering up the dark corners of our attics and garages. “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes,” Thoreau warned, long before REI or Amazon began feeding our shopping habits. Or, as Joe Romano tells us, We can take you on a hike. We can’t turn you into someone who likes hiking.
It must be human nature to seek out the novel and to want to explore new ways of being in the world. But lately I’ve been thinking about the power of constancy, and what it might mean to be a deeply rooted person in a topsy-turvy world. I taught over 30 lessons last week, got my hair cut, repotted the geraniums. My piano trio gave a couple of concerts. I planted cool-weather salad greens. I asked, “How did you practice this?” 108 times. Meanwhile, horrible things happened in this country and around the globe. The juxtaposition between the ordinary and the extraordinary is enough to give one emotional and spiritual whiplash.
No wonder many of us are actively looking for escape routes, searching out greener pastures elsewhere, wishing for a life raft off this island of corruption and injustice. We can show you different-looking squirrels, Romano Tours promises. But you are still you. And the squirrels in Italy are just different squirrels.
Just different squirrels.
That gives me pause. I’ve got plenty of squirrels right here as it turns out, and plenty of practicing to unpack every day. There’s the crowd of wiggling, squirming Little Ones, every single one of them wanting to play “Zachariah Zebra” for the October studio class, but none of them remembering to fill in their practice boxes. There’s beautiful, fragile Clare, who loves Chopin, but may have to settle for Clementi if she doesn’t pick up the pace on her recital piece. There’s the friend who lost her sister recently and the former student who struggles with drug addiction and relapsed last month. There’s the email to the overly enthusiastic colleague—who borders on overbearing and aggressive—that I still haven’t responded to sitting in my inbox.
There’s more too, of course. There’s the pile of cheerful pumpkins at the farm stand, the pot of bean soup simmering on the stove, the bright colorful mums basking in the sunlight on porches and stoops around the neighborhood. There are the goldfinches feasting on the late summer sunflowers in the garden, the ladder-backed woodpecker who has taken over the birdfeeder next to the roses, the house sparrows who have found the birdbath and go swimming every morning. Last Saturday I stumbled upon a farm in the North Valley that grew dahlias. Dahlias in the desert! I couldn’t stop smiling.
The truth of life is not constancy, but impermanence. Everything changes. In addition, human beings will always be tempted to seek out the novel, the adventure afar, the squirrels elsewhere. But I wonder if in this chaotic world, it might be almost an act of political subversion to keep showing up and doing one’s thing in the face of the madness all around us. Constancy as a form of practice. How we spend our time on this earth is also a form of voting.
In the introduction to Katherine White's Onward and Upward in the Garden—published posthumously—E.B. White writes about his wife, and her annual fall bulb planting tradition:
“As the years went by and age overtook her, there was something comical yet touching in her bedraggled appearance on this awesome occasion—the small, hunched-over figure, her studied absorption in the implausible notion that there would be yet another spring, oblivious to the end of her own days, which she knew perfectly well was near at hand, sitting there with her detailed chart under those dark skies in the dying October, calmly plotting the resurrection.”
It occurs to me that this is the practice of constancy at its most sacred. The world is changing rapidly, spinning out of control. No matter how this craziness rolls out, we will all someday die. But in the meantime, there are bulbs to plant, music to make, lessons to teach. The act of constancy is not ignorant or oblivious or foolhardy, it is just practice. You are still you. And at the end of the day, squirrels are just squirrels.
*It is absolutely worth watching the entire SNL sketch linked HERE. It is brilliant, and in the spirit of true confession, I have done a bit of rearranging and condensing with Adam Sandler’s monologue. Call it creative license, or something.