I hear an owl

I came across the following three passages in a light mystery, and they seemed to me to illustrate how sometimes in life a person observes someone else enjoying something in life that they themselves do not usually notice, and then the observing person starts thinking, Why don't I notice that?  Why don't I do that?  Why don't I enjoy life more by doing what that other person is doing?

------------------- [excerpt 1] -------------------- He picked up the flowers, and Rosemary rearranged the bouquets in the impromptu vases on mantel, bar, and dining table.  Then they went to the lake porch to await the sunset....

Seagulls soared and swooped and squabbled over the dead fish on the beach.  Rosemary identified them as herring gulls.  The flycatchers, she said, who were performing a nonstop aerial ballet were purple martins.  Something brown and yellow that kept whizzing past the porch was a cedar waxwing.

"I hear an owl," Qwilleran said, to prove he was not totally ignorant about wildlife.

"That's a mourning dove," she corrected him.  "And I hear a cardinal . . . and a phoebe . . . and I think a pine siskin.  Close your eyes and listen, Qwill.  It's like a symphony."

He touched his moustache guiltily. Perhaps he had been listening to the wrong voices.  Here he was in the country, on vacation, surrounded by the delights of nature, and he was trying to identify miscreants instead of cedar waxwings.  He should be reading the bird book instead of cross-written letters. ...

--------------- [excerpt 2] -------------------- The cooling of the relationship was only one development in a vacation that had hardly been a success.  It had been two weeks of discomfort, mystification, and frustration -- not to mention guilt; he had not written a word of his projected novel.  He had not enjoyed evenings of music or walked for miles on the beach or relaxed on the sand with a good spy story or paid enough attention to the sunsets.  And now it was coming to an end.  Even if the executors of the estate did not evict him, he was going to leave. ...

----------------- [excerpt 3] ----------------- Qwilleran sat on the porch alone, hardly noticing the foaming surf and the gliding seagulls.

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It's natural, in a way, to observe someone doing something and then think maybe we should do it ourselves -- it's one of the ways in which we learn and expand our experience.  On the other hand, there's no need to think that because someone else enjoys something, then we ourselves need to spend the requisite time, money, etc., to do it too.  Instead maybe just, "You enjoyed it?  Great!  Good for you."

The flip-side of this is when someone thinks others should do the same things they themselves do, and take the same precautions.  In the novel Emma, Jane Austen wrote, "One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other."

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...He had not..."paid enough attention to the sunsets."
SWA  (smiling with amusement)

And at the end of the book, he is unchanged:  sitting "on the porch, hardly noticing the foaming surf and the gliding seagulls" ...

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{excerpts, The Cat Who Played Brahms, by Lilian Jackson Braun.  Copyright 1987, Jove - Berkley, NY, NY.}

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