Nat

I only regret one life decision that I made while I was in college. I never went to study penguins in Chile or Antarctica. Tonight over coffee, I told my friend Brendan that in the mid-80s there was a lot of publicity about penguin research. El nino was a huge weather problem, and someone figured out that penguins were the only animal to adjust their behvior before an el nino pattern began. Soon, lots of organizations were offering grant money to determine how and why they did it.

To make a long story short, I could have applied to join researchers on a 6-month trip to live among the penguins at their nesting grounds in southern Chile. The most charming story I read about these penguins concerns their nighttime game playing. Because they had to sit on the eggs for so long to hatch them, the penguins had developed a game to entertain themselves. Each nesting pair built a small cairn in front of their nest with stones, and at night, the penguins raced around stealing rocks from other birds’ piles and bringing them back to their own piles.

After several weeks in tents in the fields, the researchers were able to join the game. One young scientist wrote about the poetic rush when she was finally in the game herself and she would race toward a bird’s pile, only to feel, literally, a penguin brush her leg as he raced by her on the way to steal her rocks.

I was desperate to do this, but I didn’t. “As charming as that sounds,”Brendan said tonight, “she was living in a tent without cooked food for weeks to get to those evenings. A lot of that life was just tedium, discomfort, and work.”

While I agreed, I still wish that I had played steal the rock from the penguins at night. But Brendan’s point is well taken: what we envy is sometimes just the best part of another person’s experience. And the rest of it may be nothing special.

I told him I envied two types of lives: those where the person races from one true adventure experience to the next and another where the person creates something of consequence for others to use or benefit from. He said that ordinary lives can be happy too.

I still wish I had played with the penguins when I had the chance.