Watching the Squirrels

“Are you sure you want to be the kind of person who doesn’t stop to watch squirrels?”

The voice in my head caught me off-guard last week by asking me this question as I thoughtlessly walked past a hyperactive squirrel frolicking at the base of a nearby tree.

“Fine,” I sighed, already late to class. The voice always ends up winning anyway, so I turned around and walked back to the squirrel, which seemed completely unbothered by my close proximity. I watched that little guy hop around spastically for three whole minutes.

We don’t notice it anymore, but squirrels are kind of amazing.

They are tiny like baby humans, except they are smaller, fuzzier, and have more pathetic-looking arms. They are actually one of the most hilarious creatures on earth: like jittery little crack addicts, except cuter.

Unfortunately, most of us eventually reach a point in our lives when we stop appreciating squirrels. This happens at different times for different people. Maybe you stopped noticing them at puberty, or when you discovered alcohol or when you decided to enroll in 18 credit hours.

We stop appreciating squirrels for two main reasons.

One is that we are just plain busy. We have a lot of music to listen to during our strolls through campus, and we also have a lot to think about. Our minds are constantly sorting through the phone calls we have to make, the e-mails we have to read, the papers we have to write and the resumes we have to build. We have to be constantly making plans by sending and receiving text messages if we want to stay socially connected, and we have to respond to everyone who wrote “Happy Birthday” on our Facebook wall.

It’s no wonder squirrels get pushed to the back burner. So do the sounds of nature, the clock towers that chime each hour, the other students, and the fact that our campus is so beautiful it almost isn’t fair.

The other reason for this is that we are busy being angry. We expend a lot of energy getting worked up about gay marriage, the economy, Indiana Daily Student columns we don’t agree with, and Sarah Palin’s knocked-up daughter. It’s exhausting and leaves us with little time for squirrel appreciation. After next week’s election, about half of us will be happy and half of us will be upset. And most of the happy half will eventually end up feeling disappointed, too, because no new president can take away our obsession with feeling cheated, angry and afraid. We will always find more to complain about because that is who we have allowed ourselves to become.

There will always be more to do, and there will always be more reasons to be angry.

But there will also always be fountains, clock towers and squirrels.

And I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to become the kind of person who just doesn’t stop to watch squirrels.