A Nice Day By The Beach

1/9/24

Today, as part of my job, I played with a compass, tie-dyed a shirt, set up a tent, and picked up trash off the beach. In a lot of ways I feel very lucky.

Granted, this is job training, and I won't be doing all of these things on a regular basis, and the compass activity too rudimentary for me to consider it fun, but either way it's not a bad a gig.

I’ve been interacting with nature in new and exciting ways. Nearly every evening I get a cup of coffee and a book and watch the sun set from the deck outside the dining hall. Some nights I fire up a microscope in the old research lab and look at different rocks, plastic objects, and cereal crumbs that I find. The longest lens magnifies to 1000x, and has a 0.18 millimeter field of view, though with a low degree of clarity. Surprisingly, a lot of things look similar at that scale.

Today I walked around in a field blind folded, as part of orienting training, and it made me very aware of touch and sound. I sat on the ground and listened, and reached around for sticks to play with. As a mindfulness exercise, I think it has a lot of potential. I wondered if I could walk around blind for any amount of time with some degree of success. I figured it would be worth a try.

I also walked barefoot on sand, which, for someone with relatively soft feet like, requires very intentional movements. Though at times uncomfortable, walking bare foot always shows me the details of a landscape I miss while cruising over it with shoes.

In my free time, I've been reading an introductory book on the principles of physical science. The book begins with exploring the discoveries and theories made by some Greek men in the 400-200ish AD era. Discoveries and theories that led to the scientific method, which led to modern science, which allows me to be an environmental science instructor today. Just some guys sitting around making observations about the world around them, without the aid of impressive instruments. It's incredible how much we take for granted, being born with so many things already figured out.

I feel a certain sort of kinship with the ancient Greek philosophers. Being fairly uneducated myself, prior to my working in this field, I am making the same sorts of observations that they were making, some 2,500 years ago. Observations mostly on the self, and nature in a larger, broad sense. The sort of observations one can make without impressive instruments. But even I feel as thought I'm cheating.

Any students seems to be faced with a dilemma in this era. We live in an excellent time for learning facts, but an awful time for critical thinking. It's very easy to know things, but it's also very easy to avoid thinking about how you come about knowing things.

This would be the difference between first hand knowledge and second hand knowledge, where the former is things you figure out yourself, and the latter is things you hear from someone else.

Similar to my thoughts about re-exploring nature, I think that there's great value in re-exploring any knowledge you rely heavily on.