#5: Ferdinand & Mindfulness
Written in 1936, The Story of Ferdinand by American author Munro Leaf (great name, right?) was one of many books that littered the bookshelf in my childhood bedroom.
I say littered, because at this age any books I owned were usually in a state of being halfway on, or halfway off the bookshelf – never entirely put away. Quite often they just lay on the floor in front of it.
I read Ferdinand cover-to-cover many, many times. It had a distinctive red jacket with striking artwork inside and out.
It’s not often I get to talk about this book, but on the very rare occasion it does come up in conversation, I’m surprised to find that most people have never heard of it. Similarly when I emigrated to the UK, I expected that everyone who lived there would have heard of Bad Jelly the Witch because it is by Spike Milligan – a well-known British comedian and author – but not a single person I’ve mentioned it to in the twenty-plus years since I arrived here ever has.
Maybe it wasn’t a popular title back then. I don’t recall where my copy of the book originally came from or how it wound up on my bookshelf, but either way, Ferdinand came into my life.
One of the things that makes the story enduring, I think, is that it has something for children and adults alike. A few years ago I found myself randomly thinking about Ferdinand once again. With my original copy long gone – probably given away and now lost – I decided to buy a new one. It now sits on my (tidier) bookcase as a treasured possession.
Next to Bad Jelly the Witch.
The gist of the story is that a bull named Ferdinand hangs out in a paddock with a group of other young bulls. The other bulls are obsessed with competing to be chosen to fight the matador in the big bullring in Madrid, so they run around all day practising, charging at and fighting each other, hoping to catch the eye of the selectors. But Ferdinand isn’t interested in any of that. All he wants to do is sit quietly under a tree and smell the flowers.
He is teased by the other bulls and becomes a loner, but he doesn’t care. He just wants to sit there, look around, take it all in and quietly marvel at the wonder and beauty of nature.
One day the selectors arrive from Madrid. The young bulls enthusiastically start doing gymnastics, charging about, trying to impress. Ferdinand isn’t the slightest bit interested and wanders off to sit under his tree and sniff his flowers.
He accidentally sits down on a bee which stings him: in pain, he jumps up with a jolt and starts running back and forth, stamping and snorting. The selectors are impressed by his ferocity and cart him off to Madrid.
On the day of the bullfight, the bee sting has worn off and Ferdinand is once more his placid self. He ambles into the ring, bemused by the matador and the entourage that greets him. The ladies in the crowd throw flowers down to him; he walks around smelling them, eventually sitting down to appreciate their scent, ignoring the men he is meant to fight. The matador throws a tantrum and storms off, Ferdinand is taken back to his pasture and lives out his days happily smelling flowers.
As a child I immediately understood Ferdinand’s pacifism. What’s the point of wasting energy fighting, when we can all just smell flowers and be happy?
So I decided that whenever given the opportunity, I should stop to smell flowers.
The flowers are obviously a metaphor and could be anything. Like being a kid and having all the time in the world to lie on your back in the grass and stare endlessly at the sky and the clouds .
The point is to be present in the moment and appreciate what’s happening around you when it’s happening.
If we’re using the trendy label, these days we call it mindfulness.
Remember when mindfulness was a thing? You don’t hear it being talked about so much anymore. It seems to have fallen victim to the pandemic. Only a couple of years ago it seemed to be the only thing I was hearing about. I’m not sure why it slipped off the radar after enjoying brief but intense popularity, despite being touted as a new, permanent way of thinking about and approaching life. I would have thought that with the stress of a global pandemic, we could all do with mindfulness now more than ever.
Mindfulness is simple. Or at least it should be.
Despite the corporate industry that suddenly sprang up around it and made it seem overly complicated, it is really nothing more than the ability to occasionally stop, clear your mind and check in with any of your five senses to experience and appreciate what’s happening around you.
Just like Ferdinand.
Taking a moment to… be curious. Be delighted. Be stimulated, be grateful, to learn. To never stop having that childlike fascination for something – anything – that can be really simple, utterly complex, or both at the same time. Like the delicate intricacy of a flower, or the aromatic appeal of its scent. Just stop and take a few seconds to enjoy it, perhaps ponder further why that thing is the way it is.
We’re so busy in our lives now, we either have no time for mindfulness or we’ve forgotten how to be mindful. Instead, we need apps, subscriptions with mindfulness coaches and consultants who invoice companies so we can all go on a course at work to understand what it is.
We have to pay someone to be reminded of what it’s like to be four years old.
Because we all instinctively knew how to be mindful when we are kids. But then we lost it.
Mindfulness is about being in the moment and being aware of that state of presence. Being simply connected to your senses, seeing, feeling, touching, tasting, hearing. Then taking something of value away from that moment. A memory, smile. A feeling of wistfulness. That’s pretty much all we’re doing when we’re kids.
We don’t even necessarily have to learn anything from the experience, but just experience it. Being tickled is fun, so I’ll just tickle myself. Oh… why doesn’t that work? I don’t know. Ah well. What next? I might try poking a stick into that wasp’s nest and see how that goes.
But then, at some point, we’re told to put aside such childish things and grow up. All that smelling flowers business is silly now, so stop it. We get it knocked out of us.
The American astrophysicist and science communicator, Carl Sagan, once said that when you talk to kindergarten kids, or first grade kids, you find a class full of science enthusiasts: and they ask deep questions.
What is a dream? Why do we have toes? Why is the moon round? What’s the birthday of the world? Why is grass green?
He said these were profound, important questions. They just bubble right out of kids. You go and talk to twelfth grade students and there’s none of that. They’ve become leaden and incurious. He said, “Something terrible has happened between kindergarten and twelfth grade – and it’s not just puberty.”
Sagan further commented on how the excitement of science is not made easily available to kids, adults somehow beat it out of them. They start out excited and then we arrange, at school or at home, for them to wind up not liking it.
He talked about the “enormous, remarkable capability of virtually every small child for learning. They start out eager, intellectually wide-eyed, asking extremely clever questions about the world. And then something happens, by and large, to discourage them. And I think it’s a tremendous waste of national resources. For example, a kid asks, “mommy, why is the grass green?” and very often you get an answer like, “oh, don’t ask dumb questions,” or, “who knows?” when in fact it’s an extremely profound question.”
“How much better would it be to say to the child, “that’s a good question Johnny, I don’t know the answer, maybe we could look it up,” or, “nobody knows, maybe when you grow up you will be the person to find out.” I think kids who are discouraged from asking those questions wind up learning the lesson that there’s something bad about using the mind and we lose resources; and we need those intellectual resources because we are in very perilous times [Sagan was speaking in 1978] and I think the complex and subtle problems we face can only have complex and subtle solutions. We need people able to think complex and subtle thoughts. I believe a great many children have that capability if only they’re encouraged.”
At some point we forget, or are made to forget, how to be mindful. Because we’re told that way of experiencing the world is for little kids, but now it’s time to start acting like a grown up.
I can think of a good example, as an adult, of when I wish I was mindful, but at the time I definitely wasn’t.
Currently we live in the age of the smartphone, that little device that runs our lives for us.
Back in the day when you went to a live concert, you could show your appreciation and instantly bond with tens of thousands of fellow concertgoers by holding up a lighter and waving it from side-to-side. Even if you weren’t a smoker, you’d still take a lighter with you for that reason alone.
Now, people turn on their phone camera lights and wave those about instead. When you watch Glastonbury on TV, if people are not waving their camera lights around in a spontaneous moment of unity, then they are usually holding their phones up in front of their faces to make videos.
They are filming what is happening right in front of them, watching it on a tiny screen as they record it… but not actually watching it with their own eyes.
So why bother going in the first place? For the mud and body odour? Even I’m watching it on a larger screen than they are from the comfort of my living room.
Sure, the video is a keepsake, stored for some future nostalgia. But it’s srill going to be a memory of watching something on a screen, rather than watching the actual thing.
I’m completely guilty of doing this myself.
I was invited to the opening ceremony of Terminal 2 at Heathrow Airport, which was going to be officially opened by the Queen.
I was no-one special, merely invited as cannon fodder to line the route that she would take when she entered the building and walk to the podium where she would unveil the plaque.
Once I was in position, I realised that she would probably walk straight past me, like really, really close by. There were no barriers or police officers that would be between us, but an open space of maybe two metres at most. It was probably the closest I was ever going to get to The Queen in my life.
She came in and sure enough she headed straight for me.
I quickly glanced around. From what I could see, pretty much every single person present had a phone up in front of their faces taking photos and recording every moment. No-one was looking directly at her. Everyone’s direct gaze, their unbroken line of sight, was blocked by their individual, personal screens. They were watching an artificial version of her, rather than the analogue original.
So what did I do? The exact same thing.
Maybe it was FOMO. Maybe it was realising I’d never get another opportunity to take a picture of the Queen up this close. I held up my phone and pressed the button a few times. Then it was over. I looked up using my own eyes this time, but she’d already walked past and I was looking at the back of her blue coat.
Afterwards, I wondered what she makes of it all. She has been gawped at by crowds her entire life. But at least they used to look at her directly and interact with her. At some point over the last decade, she stopped seeing any faces and smiles. Now she just sees headless bodies holding up black rectangles. It must have felt like an inspection at a robot factory, not the opening of an airport terminal.
I still kick myself over this. I really wish I’d just kept my phone tucked away. Everyone knows what she looks like, I don’t need to take pictures. I should have just enjoyed being in the moment, sat back, taken it all in and enjoyed the few seconds that the British monarch walked right past me. If I had, I would have been the only person there who did. She might have even stopped to talk to me, as the only recognisable human face.
Instead, like a total dick, I got my precious snap and stuck it on Facebook.
Having forgotten how to be mindful, I think our perception of time prevents us from being able to easily revert to it.
As adults we’ve developed and matured our concept of time, but as kids it means nothing to us. It’s an abstract, relative concept. How long until dinner? Half an hour? No way! Are we there yet? Come on, how much farther?
We have no concept of the past as children, because we don’t have a past yet. We’re still too young. We haven’t had time to do anything memorable.
We don’t have any concept of the future yet either, because we’re too busy being mindful. Let’s see… I’m just going to stick a finger in my ear to check what that feels like. Hmm, OK interesting – now let’s try that again but with some peanut butter.
At that age, adults are also running interference for us. They’re protecting us, for the time being at least , from the heavy responsibilities that lie in wait – like paying rent, getting a job, putting food on the table.
Then, inevitably, unavoidably…we get older. We have a better understanding of time, we have more experience and a few more scars, now we have a past and a future to occupy our thoughts. Both of which provide competition for the present.
We regret past events and are anxious about future ones. We tend to focus on those emotions and by doing so, ignore what is happening right in front of us.
As a youngster, the only thing to worry about is what’s happening right now. What happens when I stick my arm into that tree trunk? Why does sandpaper feel rough? Why can’t I breathe underwater? What are the stars? Why can’t I have ice cream for breakfast? Should I lick that frog?
We were already mindfulness experts. Then we grew up and forgot. Now we go on courses to be told how it works.
Ferdinand reminds me that now, more than ever, I should stop and take the time to smell the flowers and keep an inquisitive childlike fascination about the world I live in.
As an adult I can understand why a flower smells the way it does and what purpose that aroma serves in a botanical and evolutionary context; like a child I still can and still should smell the flower just to appreciate its scent.
It makes me want to keep being curious and learning so I can find the pleasure in other things too. What’s the point of having five senses if you’re not really connected to them? The taste of a tomato. The sound of a guitar. The feel of a sculpture fashioned from marble. A fireworks display. The smell of a Sunday roast.
Committing to lifelong learning, always looking to expand knowledge and understanding, sharing it with others and taking the time to appreciate the moments when they happen – there’s a dopamine hit that goes with that. It connects you to the ground. It feels good. There is joy there.
As Ferris Bueller once said, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
Suerte de Varas, or Bullfight (1824) by Francisco de Goya, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California, USA
