ADVENTURES IN A TIN CAN: The purpose of life (for animals)
During our trip, my Main Squeeze and I encountered a variety of animals: cows, goats, sheep, dogs, cats, ducks, geese, pigs, peacocks, mosquitoes, and bees.
As my Main Squeeze and I were driving along the coast of the Netherlands and northern Germany, we would often see sheep on the levees. The levees in those areas are man-made to help protect against flooding from the North Sea. However, even though they're man-made, they look so natural: covered in grass and populated by sheep. Last year, on my first trip to Germany, I was completely charmed by all the sheep on the levees. My Main Squeeze told me they graze there to help compact the earth and to keep the grass short. The sheep are basically compacting lawn mowers.
Since my Main Squeeze and I spent quite a lot of time riding our bicycles along the levees, I got to observe the sheep a bit. They eat, they eliminate, and they sleep. And they bleat every once in a while. The purpose of their lives is to eat and sleep - and reproduce, I suppose, but we weren't there during mating season. The life of a sheep is fairly straightforward and, at least from the point of view of a human, rather monotonous. But the sheep didn't seem to mind.
One day, my Main Squeeze and I camped at a parking lot that was mainly for ferry passengers. We had stayed there previously and this lot was usually empty, which is why we went there. We knew there were cows in the field next to the parking lot. On this occasion, the cows were closer and my Main Squeeze and I got out of the Tin Can to get a better look. The cows moved closer to the fence, which my Main Squeeze told me must be electrified since the cows were very deliberately not getting too close. Since we were parked backed up right to the fence, we were quite close to the cows. Close enough to see how their noses would wrinkle when they opened their mouths. Close enough that I could hear them as they yanked the grass and chewed it. We watched the cows for a while, then went back into the Tin Can, but kept the curtains open to see the cows. At 8:50pm (it was still light out), the cows all started moving towards a gate. My Main Squeeze and I observed - why did they all go there? Was the cow farmer coming? Did a vet come? We waited and watched. Nothing happened. And after about 20 minutes, the cows all started walking away from the fence and back out to the field.
Was this the life of the cows? Eating grass and waiting? Like the sheep?
I have always been attractive to mosquitoes. I am a mosquito smorgasbord. However, I react differently to mosquito bites depending on location. My reaction in Europe was fairly typical (meaning not very severe) and so I had my after-bite stick that I'd rub on the mosquito bite as soon as I noticed it. Mosquitoes seem to exist for the sole purpose of buzzing in your ear and sucking your blood. And those are the females. What do male mosquitoes do, other than mate with female mosquitoes? That doesn't seem like much of a life, does it?
My Main Squeeze's dad is a bee keeper. I have a slight aversion to bees since I've been stung by them a couple of times and it was painful and the area got swollen. But Dad has been a bee keeper for a long time and he opens the hives and pulls out the segments without wearing one piece of protective gear. And then he shows everything to me as I squeamishly back up while nodding anxiously, "yeah, yeah, I see. Mmm hmm..." He explained the colony of bees: who the drones were and what they did; who the workers were; how they got a queen; how he identifies the queen of each hive by year; how they needed to be fed when the weather was bad. It was fascinating! Dad would pull out a segment, show it to me, point to a drone versus a worker. He would scan the hundreds of bees and show me the one queen among them, identifiable by the colored dot that Dad had glued on her back (please take a moment and think about that: he glues colored dots on the backs of queen bees). All of the amazingly complex parts of the hive and the process of making honey are for basically two purposes: survival (which includes eating nectar, which pollinates flowers and results in honey, and reproducing) and to serve the queen.
The colony of bees works with the precision of a Swiss watch: everyone has a role; everyone has a job; everyone does their job and then they die. There are no ambitious bees who want to get promoted from worker to drone, or overthrow the current queen, or even move to a swankier hive. Doesn't that sound like every dystopian movie made, ever? (*My Main Squeeze just read this paragraph and informed me that there are, indeed, some rogue bees who take a queen and try to leave to make their own hive. But since neither he nor I really know about this, I'm not changing my paragraph).
In one of our parking lots, we saw a bird had made a nest on a pile of gravel, right in front of the parking meter. It seemed like a bad place to build a nest, but the pile of gravel was cordoned off, presumably because it was going to be used for some purpose. Mama bird had laid 3 little eggs and was sitting on her nest. When cars drove in front of the gravel pile, she calmly stayed on her eggs, but as soon as people got close, because they were going to pay the parking meter, she'd get up and walk away, leaving her eggs exposed. And despite the fact that it was summer, it was actually quite cold. My Main Squeeze and I were worried that her eggs would freeze, especially since a lot of people went to that parking meter - most of them completely oblivious to mama bird and her nest.
As I observed the animals around us in their natural environments, I kept thinking of their lives versus our lives. We spend so much mental energy trying to find our place, trying to figure out our purpose, trying to understand what we should do with our lives. The animals that I observed don't seem to have this existential dilemma. They seem to understand their purpose and they go about their lives.
Having the opportunity to observe these animals gave me a new perspective on my own life. Human lives aren't easy. Our purpose is not based solely on biology. We get to choose our paths and yes, we struggle to find our way. But given the opportunity, would we trade our lives for the life of a sheep?
