Going to the crows

Musings on mysterious transformations and the tyranny of leveling up

Last Tuesday at 2pm, a baby across the street was screaming about the heat. By 7pm I swear it had turned into a crow.

The noise of baby crying its head off and young crow gurgling came from exactly the same direction. And I’ve no evidence to suggest that the baby turned into a crow. But I’ve no evidence for a different explanation, either.

There will be a sub-section of philosophy that deals with this, probably. At the University of York in the early 2000's, I used to look in awe and wonder at the notebooks of fellow students studying philosophy. I stood in the break room of the University Radio station, gazing in disbelief at a page covered with ciphers, which was probably some kind of logical argument, but I could neither decipher nor understand the subject matter, let alone the detail.

Let A be the proposition 'A baby exists.' Let B be the proposition 'A crow exists.' Let T be the proposition 'A baby turns into a crow.'

∀x(Creature(x)→CapableOfSurpriseTransformation(x))

Creature(Baby)

∴CapableOfSurpriseTransformation(Baby)

P(T)=0

I'm making this up, I was a psychology student and we had nothing so useful in our toolkits. We just knew that it was possible to turn your classmates into Nazis by locking them in a basement for 3 weeks. And that hasn't particularly come in handy in my career, yet.

I tried to engage Child 1 in a bit of whimsical banana-ing about the crow/baby conundrum. Child 1 was not interested because he’s more interested in ‘The Grind’, at the moment. Not Grindr, that’s something else. The Grind is where you go into the forest and kill boar for 37 hours, just to buff your Level 1 avatar to a Level 2, so that you can kill a slightly bigger boar on open ground. I'm being facetious. Child 1 has been at this for years and now has a Level 48 avatar. His eyes don't work in daylight, but he can one-shot a Zorah Magdaros and that is Something, apparently.

I’m talking about computer games, but I am worried that grinding too much for too long can damage the psyche. The Grind teaches kids that we are weak and feeble and not enough as humans. We have to level ourselves up gradually, we should never expect to stop. Before enlightenment, taught the Buddha, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood carry water.

But keep chopping wood, carrying water, every day, basically. Is it necessary? I know some seriously successful people who are still grinding in their 60s, and I wonder whether there is any point at which they will stop, unless stopping becomes the goal. Presumably, that is the main challenge of retirement. We either spend it genuinely learning to relax, and making friends with the crows, or we spend the entire time chasing more ways to grind, forgetting that the whole point of having been doing this for 40 years is that we can now stop.

Sam is already making friends with the crows by feeding them ham. This has led to a hilarious shopping list which had ‘crow ham’ listed just above ‘ham.’ Because we want to make friends with our local corvids, but we also acknowledge that we can’t be feeding them Tesco Finest Wiltshire Thinly Sliced or we'll end up bankrupt.

To work actively against Grind culture—even though most of us are still in it for another few decades—Walk the Pod Series 58 will be on the subject of Rest (is Resistance). Your new series starts next Monday 7 July. Listen here.

If you'd like to support my work, you can do so at Patreon: https://patreon.com/c/rachelwheeley, but I'll always put most stuff out for free. It's just if you like to keep your local walking podcaster in crow-ham.