Every
year, my husband and I take a break from the New York winter and spend
some time unwinding on a beach. For the past four years we’ve gone to
Jamaica. Mostly it’s pure lovely downtime – I really make the effort to
“contain” work, so that I just have one 30-60 minute session of
emailing or blogging each day. Like right now.
My
brain really never stops considering things, though – that’s just how
I’m wired – so I thought I’d share something cool with you that I just
found out. Yesterday at the beach, Patrick brought me this fascinating
creature (the picture above); a big sea shell with a claw sticking out
of it. He said it was crawling along the beach by pulling itself with
its claw.
I
looked it up just now, and I believe it’s a hermit crab. They have
long, soft bodies that they curl into an abandoned shell (whose original
occupant has died), and then grasp into the shell with their “tail” –
really the end of their abdomen. As they grow, they need to find
progressively bigger shells. But then I started wondering – how do they
find a shell that’s the right size when they need it? They must be very
vulnerable to predators, I reasoned, when they’re between shells.
Then Wikipedia gave me a really interesting answer:
Several
hermit crab species, both terrestrial and marine, use “vacancy chains”
to find new shells: when a new, bigger shell becomes available, hermit
crabs gather around it and form a kind of queue from largest to
smallest. When the largest crab moves into the new shell, the second
biggest crab moves into the newly vacated shell, thereby making its
previous shell available to the third crab, and so on.
And
I started to think about how “vacancy chains” are a big part of human
life, as well. It’s just that they’re somewhat more complex, so harder
to see. But, for instance, every time someone moves to a larger/better
house, it starts a vacancy chain. Every time someone moves to a
bigger/better job: a vacancy chain. And we’ve used the internet to
create more efficient vacancy chains, too: to sell stuff we no longer
need because we’ve acquired a newer or better version, to let other
people know that we’re wanting to move on to a better relationship,
organization, dwelling.
There’s
an internal analogue as well. When we learn something new, or
understand something that previously eluded us, we’re moving to a bigger
comprehension of the world and abandoning our outgrown worldview.
That
kind of internal change is difficult; we feel vulnerable when we’re
‘between understandings.’ But here’s an inspiration to keep growing and
‘moving along the chain’ mentally and emotionally: when we cling to a
smaller understanding of ourselves or the world around us, we’re
actually getting in the way of evolution.
Keep moving…..
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