Looking at birds

Walking along the water on Easter Sunday it occured to me that it's the present we don't know what to do with, and not the past or the future. Furthermore, the fact that there's not all that much of a future available to me, and that what is available looks less and less inviting, doesn't mean there's any less of a future available to others, the kids in this country, for instance, who want to change the gun laws.

I was at Heron's Head Park in the Bayside neighborhood of San Francisco, walking with a bird-watcher who was armed with high-powered binoculars and a notebook to record the birds. The bird watcher was watching birds, I was mostly watching where I was walking and thinking the stuff I think when I walk, which is not really thinking at all but some other form of consciousness that I've come to regard as thinking.

I thought, we don't form our thinking anymore, therefore we don't think. Thinking takes the time we don't think we have, the extra time it takes to think. Thinking is actually extremely compact, it never takes as long as we think, but we seem to be reluctant to put problems down in front of us, as they did in the Renaissance for instance, and think the problems through...

The day had dressed up for Easter, to show us, I like to think, not only how bright and beautiful a Sunday could possibly be but to hint at all the the dazzling days that could possibly follow. My companion shared her binoculars with me so I could see the avocets, bufflehead ducks, gulls, cormorants, American widgeons, a white-crowned sparrow, and a Scaup. The birds we're either floating on the water, diving beneath the water for food, or flying from tree to tree; whatever it was they were doing it looked like fun to me.The ducks especially were regal: the males and females looked like little Cleopatra's sailing lazily down the Nile in a barge.

Yeah, I thought, I guess there's such a thing as a future: think how long these birds have been living! Not these particular birds of course but their species. And the kids now are way ahead of me, they know stuff and are doing things about what they know that I didn't know until I was 18, 20.