The Giant Tortoise

The giant tortoise was hard to ignore.  Dirty and lazy, slow moving, the really giant males and the somewhat smaller females posed intently for its human audience. Eating guavas smeared over it face, belching out intestinal fumes and noises, the tortoise was not the cuddly animal that I was attracted to.  Covered by tons of armor, wrinkled and stern, the tendency of the tortoise to hide behind it armor did not trigger my curiosity or make me want to un-shell the creature and see more.  And I was truly not offended by its lack of interest in the funny looking humans hovering over it taking a billion pictures every day of the week and following it around wondering what might happen next that was different than the previous moment…..which never happened. 

Indeed, when I asked myself, whether I would choose to live my life for 150-175 years as a tortoise or 3-4 years as a hummingbird, my immediate reaction was the hummingbird.  But as I slowly navigated my 67 ½ -year-old body, walking stick in hand, sweaty and hot, around the tortoise poop returning back toward the bus to our ship, I became a bit more circumspect in my thinking.  It was at that moment that my mind was filled trying to answer whether in the 3 years of the expected lifespan of the hummingbird, there would be more life lived than by the tortoise living 50x longer.  Maybe I’m asking myself the wrong question.  

Clearly my hummingbird years have disappeared forever, but I wish that my remaining time on earth is less dreary and uneventful - in a positive way - then the tortoise's monotone existence......

doing dirty

...and more dirty

I only wish I was that tall