Surprising
Today, for the first time, I saw a flock of birds migrating south for the winter. I don’t mean that this was the first time I’d ever seen birds fly south—I’m sure they haven’t been avoiding me all these years. I mean that this was the first time I’d ever seen birds fly south and *realized* that they were migrating. Isn’t that odd?
If you’d asked me yesterday if I’d ever seen birds flying south for the winter, I’d have said, “Sure, of course I have! Who hasn’t?” But really the notion that birds fly south for the winter has been cemented in my mental list of “facts about the world” from a young age*. Not only was I confident that birds really do migrate, I had the vague sense that this was rather obvious and that I’d confirmed what books and television had told me by observing the phenomenon myself. Not so, apparently.
I think I’m supposed to extrapolate from here to some brilliant insight about the nature of learning and the difference between knowledge gained through direct observation and that gained through hearsay. Um, it’s different. It’s strange to think of all the things that I assume to be true because I’ve been told so repeatedly, but that I’ve never checked up on.
Now that I’ve drawn a vague, tangential conclusion, I’ll close with a question. Have you ever seen birds migrating and been aware that they were, in fact, migrating? Am I the least observant person ever?
Well, that’s a wishy-washy way to go at it. If this were an SAT essay, it *might* score a two out of six on a good day.
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* The first joke I remember learning: Q - Why do birds fly south for the winter? A - Because it’s too far to walk! Guffaw.
Tags: miscellany
October 10th, 2006 at 11:43 pm
What I really didn’t get was during my first winter in Boston, I watched flock of geese… oh, mid december… flying NORTH. I screamed at them (from a parking lot) that they were going the wrong way… Got some weird looks, but nobody said a word. Ahh, Boston.