By Ethan Maurice | February 11, 2020
My friend is a true artist. A feeler with strong intuition, she lives in deep connection with the desert she calls home.
Her walks through the desert are her daily source of renewal. The smell of creosote in rare desert rains moves her more than anyone is moved by a smell. She feels an energy between all things that I could once only logically intuit.
I am often inspired by her connection to everything. Our time together has connected me to all these gifts, strengthening my connection with the natural world. Recently, however, she told me something I simply have not been able to believe or connect with: red-tailed hawks are messengers.
To her, sighting a red-tailed hawk is more than a coincidence — its flight path is more than a result of biological needs. A red-tailed hawk often bears a message for her, usually beckoning her to be more courageous in life and art. She reads meaning in their flight patterns and believes they arrive when she needs them most.
I understand the archetype of a red-tailed hawk. I understand how this majestic bird — effortlessly free, graceful, and powerful — can serve as a symbol that helps us find those qualities within ourselves. But I can’t bring myself to believe that a hawk, the universe, or something greater is sending a message. My train of thought is simply unable to arrive at the conclusion that a hawk passing by overhead is trying to send any sort of encouragement. Perhaps all the science classes I took in college taught me to suspend suspicions, remain unassuming, and as “objective” as possible. When I try to consider the possibility of hawks as messengers, I cannot even entertain the idea. My brain just immediately and repeatedly calls “bullshit!”
It’s important to validate that something doesn’t have to be “real” for it to be helpful.
When my friend sights a red-tailed hawk, it is useful to her. Her spirit is lifted. She is inspired to greater creativity, courage, and motivation in her work. But because I learned to “filter out the fluff” in college, to stick to the cold hard data and facts, and have seen myself as a more rational, “objectively thinking” human being, when I see a red-tailed hawk, I don’t benefit. I think, No way that hawk is sending me a message! It’s fulfilling biological needs, looking for food, and doing its own thing — entirely unrelated to me or my work.
The bottom line: my friend benefits from seeing a red-tailed hawk. And I, striving to be objective, do not.
But whether or not hawks are actually sending us a message, wouldn’t it be great to receive it? Our ancestors used to find these sorts of messages everywhere — in plants, animals, rains, winds, thunder, the moon, turns of the season — it all meant something. Today, we still understand these archetypal symbols. They’re used all the time in books, television, and movies to bend moods, foreshadow events, and illustrate meaning. Those who strive to be objective, like me, have no trouble reading such signs in a movie theater, but we’re unable to even entertain that such meaning could be found in our own lives.
This summer, while visiting my favorite mountain town in Montana, I caught up with a wise buddy of mine and I shared up my red-tailed hawk dilemma. He smiled a knowing smile in the faint orange glow of the wood-fired stove. Throwing another cup of water on the rocks, he asked, “Have I ever told you about the aboriginal legend of the Firehawk?”
The aboriginal people of Australia tell an origin story of a time before time when a Firehawk brought the knowledge of fire to their people in the form of a burning stick. Of course, when any skeptical, scientific, Western-minded individual who thought of themself as closer to the objective truth than storytelling Aboriginals, they immediately dismissed this story as pure mythology.
As he began, that’s exactly what I did.
But my friend went on to explain that a decade ago, two scientists began collecting ethnographic reports and witness accounts of three species of birds of prey that hunt along the edge of wildfires during the dry season in Northern Australia. It’s common knowledge among aboriginals that these birds of prey grab sticks ablaze from wildfires and drop them elsewhere for easy hunting. Today, though nobody has yet to capture video or photographic evidence, these scientists suspect the aboriginal legend of the Firehawk to be a story rooted in literal truth.
In a minute, this seemingly impossible, mythological story — that long ago a hawk taught a group of humans how to use fire — flipped in my mind to oh my god… that could be true.
While fascinating, whether or not a hawk taught a group of humans how to use fire is not the point here. The point is that by believing I am being objective, I instantly dismiss the potential truth in the story of the Firehawk. Only when the Firehawk is explained in a way that checks the boxes my “scientific, objective” mindset likes checked, am I able to consider what previously didn’t fit my model of the world.
I’ve come to think that, like a hammer in a carpenter’s tool bag, perhaps objectivity is better used as a tool among other tools. A hammer is great for pounding nails and prying boards, but a hammer sucks at screwing screws, sanding surfaces, and making a precise cut in a piece of wood.
In the same way, striving to be objective is vital for dealing with numbers, science, and logic in general. But when it comes to more human, feeling things, I suspect there are other tools that better suit the job.
As Paul Kalanithi, a young, cancer-ridden brain surgeon wrote during his dying days in When Breath Becomes Air:
Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.
Put another way: remaining objective is the omission of feeling, emotion, and humanity from consideration. We humans are creatures that operate on feelings. Emotion, not logic, is the driving force of our actions and lives. This means that, today, everyone striving to be objective is striving to see the world in a way that intentionally ignores the main system by which we operate.
Telling my brother about my struggles with this idea, he thought it curiously connected to a video he watched of Nick Ahmed, perhaps the best defensive shortstop in Major League Baseball, talking about the moment he turned his life over to God during a baseball game. I have always rolled my eyes at such notions, but perhaps this was a case of my objectivity cutting me off from something humanly important.
So, I watched the video.
The whole clip was Ahmed describing a psychological shift from performance anxiety and intense worry about not becoming a Major League Baseball player to the unbelievable relief found in between innings of a minor league game when he decided to just put the outcome in God’s hands:
It just gave me the peace that I never had before… It’s not that everything has changed for me on a circumstantial basis, but everything on the inside has been different. I still go through ups and downs, but I’m not riding this huge roller coaster of extreme highs and extreme lows and having no peace and no joy on a consistent basis.
Once again, my “scientific, objective” mindset wouldn’t allow me to believe what Nick believed, but what a gift. How better to let go of anxiety about the results and get out of your own way than to believe the outcome is in someone else’s hands?
Over the holidays, I started reading Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. To my great surprise, the book was a hilarious, heartbreaking illustration of the folly of constant objectivity.
You know that page at the beginning of a book where the author puts a relevant, profound quote or two? It read:
“Live by the foma* that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.
*harmless untruths.”
The things that inspire our spirits to soar, that bring us together, that tear us apart, that we’ll lay down our lives for, that are deep and moving — are omitted when we strive for objectivity. And thus, to look only through an “objective” lens is to overlook our most potent, powerful resource: our humanity.
To live our best lives as human beings, it’s time we realize that “what is true?” is not always the same question as “what is best?” Not to dismiss objectivity, but to reach beyond it.
*This article was originally published here in Medium’s Human Parts on February 11th.
**Photograph courtesy of Erika Maurice.
