Skip to main content

Like Fish

I took advantage of a no meeting afternoon recently to go to the pool. It was pretty empty at that odd middle of the workday hour. A few elderly people - maybe retirees, a couple of young mothers teaching their preschoolers to swim, a child being instructed one on one by a swim coach and then me. After a while, I found myself thinking how all of  us in the water were not so different from fish in an aquarium. 

The difference is that the fish naturally inhabit water and their world is forcibly constrained into a tank. For us humans its a way to get some exercise in an environment we had to be taught to work with. But the back and forth is much like the fish - there is no end game other than doing the laps and keeping at it for a period of time. Just that, we have the agency to get out of the water on to dry land and on with our lives. Fish stay there pacing the water for as long as they live. 

But whether fish actually feel bored in a way we can relate to is harder to work out. Fish-keepers sometimes see their pets ‘glass surfing’ – swimming repeatedly up and down the glass of the tank. This could be the aquatic equivalent of the pacing of a captive tiger that’s bored from a lack of stimulation. But the fish could also be stressed from an overcrowded or unfamiliar tank.

It would be great if this fleeting moment of empathy for fish could result in more lasting  outcomes. In the least it made me want to understand what it might be like to be a fish stuck in a tank entertaining humans. 

In that study, scientists observed a striped species of fish known as the cleaner wrasse. They placed a colored mark on the fish’s throat, which it would only be able to see in its reflection. They noticed that the fish used the mirror to check out the mark and then tried to remove the mark by scraping its body. It appeared to recognize itself, thus passing the test for self-awareness. 

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...
Post a Comment
Read more