You are not a bad squirrel

A friend of mine told me a story the other day about an epiphany she once had.

She was looking out her window, watching a squirrel in the yard. He would dig one place, no nut. Dig another, no nut. Dig another, no nut. Dig another, no nut. Dig another, nut! And he’d scamper off to do whatever squirrels do when they find the nuts they’d buried.

She realized that, when the squirrel dug and didn’t find a nut, he didn’t think to himself what a bad squirrel he was. He didn’t stop looking and wring his little paws and say, oh, but I can’t really do this!

We are all looking for nuts and not finding them

Stuff doesn’t work in our lives all the time.

Sometimes it’s a car that decides to stall while you’re driving it. (Ahem. My day yesterday.) Sometimes it’s a partner who doesn’t actually mesh with who you are and who you’re becoming. Sometimes it’s a job or a career or a degree that turns out not to be what you want now, or that isn’t working for some reason.

That’s our equivalent of digging for a nut and not finding it. It happens every day.

And every day we beat ourselves up about it

The definition of what makes humans different from animals keeps moving. Language? Nope. Tools? Nope.

But I suspect that we might be the only creatures who castigate ourselves when things don’t work out as planned or as hoped.

That squirrel wasn’t beating himself up about not finding a nut on the first or even fourth dig. When my dog was having frequent tummy upsets because we hadn’t figured out she was allergic to gluten, she was often physically unhappy, but she didn’t project out into the future how often she was going to feel terrible and wasn’t this a tragedy.

What would it be like if we pretended we were squirrels?

Or dogs, or oak trees, or pick your living being here.

What would it be like if we could engage our unfound nuts without worrying that it means we’re bad squirrels?

What if we could engage a difficult dissertation or a bad adviser or a terrible job market or a problematic department without believing that it says anything about who we are as a person?

What if we could engage them as something that didn’t work, and move on to the next attempt?

You are not a bad squirrel. Go find your nut.