We were spending some time at a good friend’s beautiful pool this month. It is an absolutely stunning pool with a slate deck, blue tile pool, and a couple statues around it. It is surrounding by massive century-old trees that make you feel like you are in the middle of the woods. As we were enjoying this remarkable ambiance, we pulled the girls out of the pool and took a minute to dry off while sitting on the lawn chairs underneath those beautiful hundred year old oak trees. And then it happened.
A squirrel high in the branches of the oak began to repeatedly drop acorns at us, trying his best to hit us where it counts. One after the other, the grenades fell, merely missing us as they smashed along the ground. We tried to locate exactly where the perpetrator was, and the bombs only increased. As long as we stood under the giant oak tree, the onslaught continued.
After a while, we said the heck with this, and ended up simply going back into the pool to the safety of the water. And out of the squirrel’s reach. He eventually realized his efforts had become futile as he ran along the branches and proceeded to his next task.
This crazy squirrel got me thinking. How many squirrels do we encounter each day? In his famed work, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, biologist Robert Sapolsky writes about his experience watching baboons interact, or paraphrasing him, their constant attempts to drive each other crazy. The latter is ingrained in our DNA, and some of us have this tendency ingrained to a much larger degree than others. Some of us, oftentimes, resemble squirrels more than humans. And there are certainly squirrels all around us. Some of my favorite daily squirrels that I encounter are:
- The Prius/Subaru station wagon that goes 15 miles per hour in front of me on the way to work (and goes through every stop sign. Squirrel
- The guy in his Charger that revs it and goes 70 down our tiny street while my kids are playing outside in the yard. Squirrel (and though he looks the furthest from the Prius/Subaru squirrel, they could not be more squirrel-like on the inside).
- The email squirrels at work that try to schedule 150 meetings (newsflash—meetings are not work) and uses terms like, “please advise”, “circle back”, and “granular”.
And yes, I know what you are thinking—I bet Champ can be a real squirrel at times. You aren’t wrong, and I openly admit it and work on it daily. Squirrels are all around us. We can try to avoid them, but this squirrel-like tendency is not going anywhere. Social media’s toxic fumes, the Internet’s unending reach, and the constant and unstoppable push of our overlord’s influence to permeate into our homes will likely only increase the onslaught by the squirrels (in academia, they force you to listen to lecture after lecture by squirrels, and everyone knows they are squirrels, and nobody likes these lectures or the squirrels, yet they just keep it going as everyone is afraid to question the squirrels as squirrels don’t play by normal human rules but by squirrel rules). The several dozen children I see each morning walking to school hunched over as they are on cellphones given to them by their parents only helps to confirms that the social media squirrels are definitely connecting with their acorn bombs. Oftentimes, parent squirrels like to groom their children into future adult squirrels.
It is up to us and in our hands. Squirrels are going to be squirrels. We can stand under the oak tree with the squirrels high above dropping acorns on us, or we can walk away and enjoy a nice dip in the pool with our family. The squirrels aren’t stopping, but we can certainly ignore them.
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Header photo by Leeladhar Giri