If you have ever wanted to become a slower hiker, I have a fool-proof strategy for you: become a birdwatcher. Birding is the Absolute Most Effective Way to Take the Hike out of Hiking™. Birders will stand in one spot for fifteen minutes with baited breath to see what kind of brownish sparrow is skulking in the shrubby undergrowth. They’ll then take ten steps just to stand still again, gazing at the canopy to identify a poorly lit warbler, for twice as long. If they heard an unusual call, they may even backtrack those ten steps of progress and bring you back to the parking lot where you began. You can consider those first forty five minutes down the drain.
They’re not all bad, those birders; hiking with a birder can be charming, even, especially if you yourself are curious about birds. But after a few hikes at the rather unproductive pace of three hours per mile, even the most patient are tested, and shallow curiosities are squelched. Birders are the worst hiking companions—I know this because I was one. But for 2023, I wasn’t.
2023 was my big year of not birding. Instead, I looked at other stuff. I took photos of mosses and lichens. I poked around for salamanders, watched chipmunks scurry about, and noted the rocks along the path. I even got to watch a black rat snake eat an entire squirrel. And, best of all, I just hiked, without stopping much, except when I wanted to eat a snack or take a break or watch a squirrel get swallowed into the afterlife.
In the first months of 2023 I had a new-found freedom in letting go of the birding obsession. It was up to me where to move and where to sit, not the whims of the birds. I moved lighter without a pair of binoculars dangling around my neck, and I checked my phone less often because I used my phone to record bird sightings through the eBird app. For a while, I was glad I had been liberated of the compulsion to record birds everyday, everywhere I went.
Sometimes, though, the pendulum swings too far in the other direction. When I first stopped birding I did notice other things, but in time throughout the year I stopped paying attention to those things, too. I wasn’t recording the rocks or the mosses I hiked past, so I steadily began to notice them less and less. I became a much faster hiker, true, but I found hikes to be less interesting, and so I began to hike generally less altogether. I started spending more time on my phone or listening to podcasts, earbuds blocking out all natural noise outside, especially in the short, in-between moments like lunch breaks.
Anything can become a vice. Virtues, taken to extreme lengths, can hold us back. Everything in moderation: it’s a foundational Greek philosophical theme, and a core teaching in Buddhist thought, too. The ancient thinkers knew it well: balance is the key to a healthy life.
Reflecting back on this year, I see both ends of the pendulum’s path. There’s the extreme birder on one end and the bird-ignorer on the other. Now, at the end of my Big Year of Not Birding, I think I’ve landed somewhere in between. It’s the landscape of my mind, and my own underlying assumptions, that I’ve learned most about through this process.
Behind my plan to ignore birds this year has been the assumption of a fixed pie of attention. When I started out this quest, I believed I possessed only so much attention—a limited amount, a fixed pie—and that directing my attention towards birds reduced the attention I had for other things. I assume this in other areas of my life, too, thinking I have only so much time, so many resources, and only so much emotional capacity to love. All of these qualities of being human, at some point in time, I have considered them finite resources.
But the curious thing is they don’t actually function like finite resources. The more I love the people and places around me, the more my capacity to love grows. Though I feel too tired to get off the couch, once I do my energy grows and compounds. The more I give, the more I realize I don’t need to hoard. The more I pay attention to one thing—like birds—the more I notice all the things around it.
A few years ago I had the opportunity to travel around Europe. On my way home I had a four hour layover in Germany. What could have been an unmemorable squat in the airport became a notable moment in my trip. Instead of sitting on my phone I grabbed my binoculars and scanned out the windows, gazing across the airstrip and to the treeline beyond. From the Frankfurt Airport I saw a Rough-legged Hawk, thirty Carrion Crows, a European Starling, and—one of my personal favorites—a White Wagtail. I had already seen these birds in Europe (they’re very common), but not in this setting, not in this country. Seeing wildlife move freely about was exciting, too, in its own right; it lifted me up out of the slump brought on by long layovers and plane rides. Instead of looking at my phone I watched a German summer day pass by.
Capitalism loves a fixed pie. It loves a finite resource that it can call scarce, put a price tag on, and monopolize. The human spirit, on the other hand, is wonderfully, paradoxically, boundless.
Here’s to 2024. May it be filled with paradoxes. And wagtails.
Jon Gorter (‘17) graduated from Calvin with degrees in English and environmental studies and holds an MS in natural resources from the University of Michigan. He enjoys fly fishing, mushroom foraging, and waterfall scrambling near his home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.
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Mmm I love your reflection on attention not being a zero sum game. I recently listened to a podcast episode (“Is there a sane way to use the internet?” on Search Engine) that talked about how our attention is being manipulated by all these websites and apps and games, and it’s cool how you are seeing your attention change in this analog way as well