(edited in January 2025)
A baby pigeon is called a squab.
Since squabs can’t eat solid food, their parents do the hard work for them by predigesting whatever it is pigeons eat, and then regurgitating it for the little ones.
As soon as the squab can leave the nest, it begins eating solid food.
***
When a friend of mine asked me to read Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth: Awakening Your Life’s Purpose, I said no.
Unlike topics like science and technology, human nature does not rapidly evolve.
So, if you want to learn about aspects of life such as relationships, ethics and morality, or finding purpose, it’s better to turn to sources that have remained relevant over long periods of time rather than modern works.
While that’s logical, it’s not what most people do.
Most people do what squabs do.
They wait for others to predigest the hard texts for them and then consume the regurgitated information. What’s worse is that this continues even after they’ve left the nest.
The problem is twofold.
Someone who grew up drinking pure spring water can immediately taste the impurities in a big city’s tap water. Yet, to someone who’s never left the city, chlorinated tap water tastes fine. Good, even. In the same way, you can’t recognize how polluted modern literature is until you’ve experienced the original, timeless works.
The second problem is one of intolerance.
The longer someone has been vegan, the harder it is for them to eat a steak.
Not because the steak is unhealthy, but due to years of celery sticks and hummus, their stomach’s ability to digest protein-dense nutrients has been severely diminished.
The classics are steaks. They are hard to chew and take a long time to digest. Especially if they aren’t a pillar of your content diet.
Modern audiences don’t like that. Modern audiences like efficiency. Modern audiences are like human squabs, waddling around, bumping into each other, asking for the most significant takeaways of the most important lessons on everything in three clean bullet points.
(They won’t read them.)
***
My friend is persistent.
I caved and bought Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth, which delves into the concept of purpose and the egos that hide that from us.
I tried to read it. Twice. On both occasions, it evoked memories of the gray tap water my apartment’s rusty sink would cough out in Istanbul.
If, at the time, I hadn’t been drinking spring water (Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment—a masterpiece on the human condition and ego), my perspective on A New Earth might have differed.
This concept extends beyond literature.
We are all boats sailing through a sea of information.
The waves and storms are cycles of media which perpetually crash against our boat. We are inundated with extreme opinions, horrific events, and rumors of people who don't even know we exist.
Many boats are lost at sea. The ones who make it are the ones with a true compass and heavy anchor. Discernment and principles are essential for a successful voyage.
To develop these things, you can’t act like a squab. To not act like a squab, you have to chew solid food.
You have to eat steak.
