Squirrel!!

Squirrel!

Do you know to what I am referring?  In the Pixar movie Up, Dug the Talking Dog suddenly shouts, "Squirrel!" in the middle of a conversation when he is distracted.

On my run today, I listened to a podcast where the host talked about living in the moment.  His comments made me think of things in my own life, and (rather ironically) my mind then started pondering those things instead of listening.  A minute or two later, I realized that I hadn't heard anything he had said since my "squirrel" moment.  So I used the convenient "back 30 seconds" feature a few times to rewind to the point where my mind went off on a tangent.

If you Google the definition of tangent, you get the following: it is "a straight line or plane that touches a curve or curved surface at a point, but if extended does not cross it at that point."  In case you don't remember geometry from high school, here's a visual aid to illustrate what that sentence means.

I like to think of my focus, the current moment, as traveling in a small circle.  Yet there are bound to be moments where I can easily go off track and follow that tangent off into space.'

This doesn't have to be a bad thing.  Following tangents can certainly lead to great creativity, for example.  However, if the tangent causes me to fixate on negativity or things that make me anxious, I need to take a step back and evaluate if that's really something I need to keep thinking about.  Have I already planned for that potential problem or taken steps to rectify it?  If so, I need to put it aside and try to live in the moment instead.  I am reminded of a scene in the first Star Wars prequel where Qui-Gon Jinn tells a young Obi-wan Kenobi to be mindful of the future, but not at the expense of the moment.

One time of day where I'm easily able to live in the moment is when I'm watching the amusing interactions of the birds and squirrels as they eat at the feeders outside my front window.  As I watched today, I imagined what a squirrel's life is like.  Wake up.  Find food and water.  Feed the babies.  Fix the nest.  Go to sleep.  Because they are wild animals, their lives are of course simpler than ours, but there is still something to learn from them.  We can clear our minds and simplify our lives by not going off on tangents and worrying about the future any more than we have to.  Here's to a Happy Squirrel kind of day!