For decades, modest binoculars have been lurking compactly at the bottom of my bag; an underused cousin to wallet, phone and keys. It turns out good optics are actual magic: not just a bit clearer, but an actual super-power. Like poaching a hawk's vision. Such clarity, focus, detail. Reaching crisp and bright into the distance: creeping invisibly up on wildlife to drink in their detail. I'm in love.
It's also true of wetsuits. Till February this year, I looked at those few seal-like surfers in grey Cornish waves and considered them ridiculously hardy. Fit and skilled they certainly are, but with a winter wetsuit (including hood and boots), I wandered into that wintry sea as open and comfortable as if it was my living room. I have the sea in winter too - that's as near magic as I expect to get.
This kind of magic is what people do: increase our control, our speed and our freedom. Binoculars render me almost disembodied: reliably unseen, unheard and unsmelled, while I watch birds. A wetsuit changes my personal season - it's warm enough to swim all year round. We can schedule reminders, emails, blog posts. Come to that literacy is so deeply integrated into who I am that pen and paper, or at least keyboard, are very much the tools I use to think with, not just tools for sharing my thoughts after the fact.
But no binoculars in the world can turn the first sight of noisily nesting black-headed gulls, into a diverse mix of seventeen species. That takes patience and attention. It takes openness to whatever is, even if - this time - it is only black-headed gulls after all.
We augment our powers, but only the active ones. It's not so easy to augment the passive ones of receiving, of attending. But the balance is important, and our tools unbalance it. There's nothing to buy which offers the attention span of a hawk to go with it's vision, the patience of a tree to match the timeproofness of wetsuits and scheduled blog posts. I wish there was.
No comments:
Post a Comment