Through the eyes of the trout...

      As you likely already know, the places where I generally go to clear my head are to the forests, the fields, and more commonly, the streams. For whatever reason, streams seem to bring me a renewed outlook on life that I cannot obtain anywhere else. Perhaps it's simply the sound of the gurgling riffles, or the peacefulness that comes when you finally reach a point in a stream where you can no longer hear a passing car on a nearby road, but more than likely, it's a combination of these and all other features that make up the areas where trout live. Robert Traver wrote that the places where trout live are “invariably beautiful”, while the places where we live “where crowds of people are found, are invariably ugly”. I've considered this many times and have realized that it is not the places where we live, but instead it is the way in which we live in these places that is ugly. Granted, there is a definitive change of scenery between the towns where people congregate, and the streams where trout congregate, but these are miniscule differences when compared to the societal disparity that exists between the two “habitats”. While I generally try to avoid anthropomorphizing, in this case, I feel it is only right to do so.

      To a trout, the concerns of the world exist in a relatively small sphere of which they occupy. The concerns of the trout are quite simple. They care only about clean water, food, someplace to live, and reproduction. They are hardly bothered by the concerns that seem to trouble us as people and plague our societies. In fact, society to a trout simply means the other trout that they may bump into in the hole that they live in. The concerns that reach the pits of their minds likely do not consist of “look at how that trout is behaving”, or “look at that trout's stupid hairstyle”. Additionally, a trout will never express any disdain over another trout for it's lack of a flat stomach (although the idea of a trout with a little mini six-pack is quite amusing). Instead, their thoughts probably more closely resemble “can I eat this fish, will it eat me, how do I outcompete it for food, and can I mate with it?” A trout will never waste the effort of examining the way another trout wears it's spots, nor will it have any concern for how much those spots cost. Likewise, the trout will never show any appreciation for how thick another trout's wallet is, and has no idea what a wallet is.

      The most complex issues of trout derive from finding the ability to discern food as it drifts rapidly past. Never has a trout involved itself in a political debate, or had a heated discussion about religion and the existence of (insert deity here). A trout has no regard for the color of another trout's skin, or how that trout may choose to live it's life. Instead, the trout cares only for how it lives its own life, and worries only about what is going on in it's own sphere of existence. It cares not about the level of education of other trout, and has no desire to assert its own intelligence over the intelligence of others. It will never choose to play mind games with, nor discount the emotions of, another trout.

      A trout will never...well, okay, I think you get where I'm going with this, so I feel I can cease my rambling. The point is, that as people, it seems at times that we have become so entangled in the complexity of life that we often forget to enjoy and embrace the most simple aspects of it. Is it possible that because of the level of intelligence that we have, we have forgotten how to use it? Has the basic quality of being human excluded our ability to appreciate humanity? If this, then, is where evolution has led us, I personally feel the need to devolve. I have seen enough of the world through my own eyes, and I think, maybe it's time for me to view the world as though I were looking at it through the eyes of the trout...