What geese know and I don’t

This weekend, my husband and I got to talking about whether the geese had left at all this year, what with the random weather and the lack of consistent frost. We live right across from Prospect Park in Brooklyn, NY, with a direct view to the lake at the south end. Short version: the geese are how we tell fall from winter and winter from spring. This season, the honking of the geese has been constant.

How, we asked ourselves, do they make the decision to migrate (or not), and in which ways is this similar to how other social animals — read: humans — make decisions? This led to a larger conversation about emergent strategy, conspiracy theories, capitalism, and labor unions. I will spare you.

Certain elements have reverberated through my mind for days. I believe we tend to make individual decisions in a hyper-local context, humans and geese alike, with accumulated consequences. Over my several decades in human rights work, I have researched this and written about it ad nauseum, as it pertains to abortion, sex work, sexual violence, and pregnancy.

But when it comes to yoga (and geese), what do I know? And perhaps more to the point: what don’t I know?

This is the question I have sat with.

Because I am not young. The main neural pathways in my brain were formed a long time ago. I also tend to be stubborn and set in my ways (I blame astrology), and I make up my mind pretty fast.

So what I sat with was this: if I make up my mind fast, and I am stubborn, how can I know I am not closing myself off to an ever-evolving hyper-local context? Or put in “geese”: if the weather keeps changing, how does each individual goose know the “decision” to not migrate was the correct one? I don’t mind telling you, I went down a rabbit hole on this one.

There are no real answers, of course, not with the mind. It is too slow, too habituated, too distracted with the news, both hyper local and broad.

And so I sit. To discipline the mind to make decisions in a context that is ever-evolving. To understand the non-finality of decision-making in the first place. To arrive back to the body which knows. To reside in the soul that exists independently of those two.

To be me.