Photo compliments of Jonny Gios from Unsplash
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Today, I stared out the window, watching a squirrel collect nuts. He seemed to be carrying them somewhere to store for winter. Back and forth he went, absorbed in his small task.
Intuitively, it gave me hope. But I couldn’t explain why.
So I did some research. I didn’t find evidence that watching a squirrel collect nuts specifically makes people hopeful. Yet, I did find research that helped me understand why this ordinary sight touched something in me.
He’s betting on a future he can’t see yet
A mature squirrel eats about two pounds of nuts a week. And, it hides thousands of them every year, mostly in late summer and early fall, according to biologist Michael Steele1. Nobody sends him a memo about January. He just intuitively knows if spring is coming.
Psychologists have a word for this, “prospection,” which means picturing the future and acting on it. Martin Seligman and Anne Marie Roepke have suggested that “faulty prospection” may be a part of causing depression. Why? People who are depressed tend to imagine a worse tomorrow. The Greater Good Science Center looks at things from a different angle2. Their research shows that imagining a future vividly makes people more patient, better at decisions, and even more generous. A 2018 study found that optimistic “prospective writing” helped trauma survivors grow after the trauma.
Hope isn’t a mood. It’s something you do in October for a January you haven’t yet met.
The squirrel also plans for things to go wrong, and he does it anyway
This squirrel is not naive. Steele discovered that squirrels, ingeniously, sometimes dig a hole, cover it up, and put nothing in it. In essence, they leave a trail of empty decoys. When researchers watched, they could find the acorns only one time in ten when a squirrel was faking1. Up to 25 percent of the squirrel’s stash is stolen by other squirrels and blue jays. Yet, the squirrel keeps burying nuts anyway. Roughly every three days the squirrel moves his stash around, possibly allowing him to keep the map of their locations fresh in his head.
Psychologist Gabriele Oettingen found that pure positive fantasizing can actually reduce effort. What works is hope plus a clear look at the obstacles, which she calls mental contrasting. The squirrel does this naturally as he expects a hard winter and thieves and therefore spreads his bets and gets on with it.
Hope that has already pictured what could go wrong is hope you can lean on.
The nuts the squirrel forgets become forests
Squirrels forget and they, therefore, lose caches of nuts. Researchers at Purdue have reported that gray squirrels’ forgotten caches sprout into oak, hickory and black walnut trees, helping to restore hardwood forests3.
The squirrel is just trying to get through the winter. Yet, every nut he misplaces is a seed he never meant to plant. Those seeds turn into trees that will shelter squirrels who haven’t been born yet. Our squirrel doing the burying today will never sit under those trees.
Most of us won’t see the full fruits of what we do i.e. a kind word, a mentor’s hour, or a small habit kept up long enough. Some of it we will forget we ever gave. And, some of it will quietly take root anyway.
Store something for tomorrow. Plant it, mean it, and let go of the rest.
Question
What’s one small thing you could “bury” this week, a note, a call, a habit, that your future self might be glad to dig up in the middle of winter?
A Daily Dose of Hope — one short reflection each day about where hope lives in our world. Read in 50 states in the US and 155 countries of the 195 countries throughout the World.
Attributions
1 Baffling the Bandits (National Wildlife Federation)
2 How Thinking About the Future Makes Life More Meaningful (Greater Good Science Center)
3 Gray squirrels’ faulty memories help forests (India Environment Portal)
