the blue jay and the squirrel
on micro-finitude
In Mammoth Lakes a few weeks ago, I spent a morning listening to my favorite album, Every Kingdom (Deluxe Version), while laying on my friend
’s deck. I gazed into the boughs of aspen trees, watching the leaves rustle in the breeze. When the album concluded, I slipped into the creek behind her cabin, letting the cold snow melt flow over me, imagining it was washing my troubles downstream. I wrung the water from my hair and sloughed the droplets off of my skin before settling in to a wooden chair to stare out into the woods, unmoving.Eventually, a blue jay entered my field of view, and I watched it do its blue jay thing. It flitted between branches, perching for a while and ruffling its feathers before flying to the next branch. Its beak oscillated between open and closed as it sang its birdcall. Its head darted around so quickly that I couldn’t detect the in-betweens—like I was only seeing keyframes in an animation, small teleportations in action.
Then I noticed a dark squirrel clamber onto a branch on an adjacent tree. It was doing delightful squirrel things. It skittered about on all fours, pausing to bring its paws to its mouth. It climbed up the trunk of the tree and paused there, perpendicular to the earth, tail whipping and twitching behind it, before continuing its ascent. I admired the rich color of its fur, the way it subtly shined in the sunlight.
Now, there are a lot of things I adore in this life, but little birbs and fluffy squirrels are extremely high on this list. Normally they exist in mutual exclusivity when I encounter them, so in seeing them together, I got greedy—I told myself there was a way to fully experience watching both at once.
To attempt this, I let my attention flit back and forth between them every few seconds. But each time I did, I felt a small panic that I would lose track of the other animal or that it would disappear. So I then tried softening my gaze towards my overall environment, trying to watch both at once. This alleviated some of my anxiety, but it left me with a different sadness—I could no longer see those fine details while trying to vaguely watch both.
I jotted down this realization in the form of a haiku:
blue jay or a squirrel
you cannot fully watch both
so you must choose one
I first encountered the term finitude in Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman (recommended to me by
). I devoured it in close to a single sitting and immediately re-read it. It touched my core, shook my worldview, and remains one of my favorite books to return to.Finitude is literally defined as “the state of having limits or bounds,” but in Four Thousand Weeks, it arises specifically in the context of our limited lifespan. We are finite creatures (read: we’re all going to die), and yet we live in an infinite world.
There are infinite people I could cultivate relationships with. But when I spend my time with one, that is time I cannot get back to spend with any others. I have a seemingly endless list of hobbies I’m attracted to, and I tell myself that I’m balancing both breadth and depth, but that’s not possible. By going deep into a few hobbies, I lose time and energy to experience many. By jumping across many hobbies, I do not give myself the dedicated time and energy to gain mastery in a few.
I have spent my whole life deluding myself into believing that I am better than this paradox. But the fact is, I am not. I can’t do it all. This is what I mean when I say that I’m focusing on finitude this year. It’s literally not possible to do everything we want, so hard choices are necessary. But that doesn’t have to be sad. It means instead that all of my choices matter and have purpose. As noted in Four Thousand Weeks:
Since hard choices are unavoidable, what matters is learning to make them consciously, deciding what to focus on and what to neglect, rather than letting them get made by default—or deceiving yourself that, with enough hard work and the right time management tricks, you might not have to make them at all. It also means resisting the seductive temptation to “keep your options open”—which is really just another way of trying to feel in control—in favor of deliberately making big, daunting, irreversible commitments, which you can’t know in advance will turn out for the best, but which reliably prove more fulfilling in the end.
Until now, I had been thinking of finitude in a macroscopic sense, in relation to choices that feel like inflection points or that speak to an investment of resources into something—such as my career, relationships, or hobbies.
With this macro-finitude, I weigh the outcome of spending my time on my budding songwriting practice vs. spending this same time studying Japanese. These choices that have an impact on me in the long run—one will foster my creativity and meaning-making, the other my language skills and ability to connect with my family and heritage.
But with micro-finitude, I weigh the choices of things that arguably don’t have a substantial outcome. My life path may not fundamentally be altered in choosing to spend 2 minutes watching a blue jay intently versus spending the same 2 minutes watching a squirrel. Such a small moment will not help me cultivate one skill over another. So in a way, it’s an insubstantial choice that shouldn’t really matter.
But I think it’s precisely because it’s seemingly insubstantial that it matters. The choice is not about which one I pick. The choice is about what you accept when I make a choice at all:
I allow myself to fully inhabit life as it is happening, taking in all of those sweet, little details
I willingly accept the loss of other things I could be paying attention to
In macro-finitude, I think about how many more times you get to experience something. I try to maximize the things, people, or places that I feel are the most important to me, while willingly sacrificing other things that are also still important to me. I can think about my life in seasons, perhaps one dedicated to songwriting, one dedicated to Japanese study.
In micro-finitude, I do not have the luxury of thinking this way. This particular sunset will never happen again. This particular interaction with a loved one will never happen again. This squirrel or blue jay will not wait for me to decide which to watch. While I spend my time trying to decide what to do, they may leave. The time will pass anyways, and my life will happen anyways. As Burkeman notes:
As I make hundreds of small choices throughout the day, I’m building a life—but at one and the same time, I’m closing off the possibility of countless others, forever. (The original Latin word for “decide,” decidere, means “to cut off,” as in slicing away alternatives; it’s a close cousin of words like “homicide” and “suicide.”)
As I move forward, I’d like to figure out how to embody finitude its entire scope. How can I make intentional choices about large time and energy investments? How can I give myself permission to knowingly let go of things that are important to me?
How can I also be here for everything that’s happening now? To hear tires roll on the asphalt as traffic rushes by, to feel warm water flow over my hands as I do the dishes, to catch every micro-expression that flits across a loved one’s face when we’re having a vulnerable conversation?
I think this presence of attention is one half of the micro-finitude puzzle. The other half is acceptance of loss. Listening intently to tires roll means letting go of the experience of listening to music at the same time. Feeling the water over my hands means letting go of doing the dishes quickly, since I’ll want to luxuriate in the sensations a little while longer. The intense focus on someone’s face means letting go of awareness of the world around me for a little while.
It’s not realistic that I can maintain a perfect adherence to finitude at all times (I am, in addition to being mortal, only human), but at the very least, I’m trying to find ways to intentionally embody it. Here’s a couple of my current commitments:
Macro-finitude: Prioritize songwriting and adjacent hobbies (singing, musicianship, guitar). To make time for this, put Japanese study and climbing on the back burner.
Micro-finitude: Engage in whole body listening with other people. Maintain eye contact. Notice when my mind is drifting and gently pull it back. Relish that another human is trying to make connection with me. Let this interaction be the only thing that matters to me in that moment, at the cost other more “productive” things I could be attending to. Let human interaction always be more important than an orientation toward constantly “improving.”
And if you’re wondering, I chose to watch the blue jay in the end. I savored every little detail until the moment ended, as all things eventually do.
“While I spend your time trying to decide what to do, they may leave.” wooof
really enjoyed this!!