And what does this have to do with my day? I was watching an interview this morning with a man who studies them in the wild, and who is doing a documentary about them over the past seven years . At the moment there is only speculation as to why Knute died in the Berlin Zoo yesterday, at the young age of just four.

This man said that while he was not a vet and did not know for sure, that perhaps the animal had a seizure of some sort, but the habits and challenges of a polar bear in the wild can not be replicated in a zoo. Polar bears are by far one of the most intelligent predators he has ever studied. Mainly because they have to live in a constantly changing landscape of ice flows, they train themselves to catch their prey in three dimensions. They stalk under water, above water, and by jumping from one chunk of ice to another. They are extremely good at challenging the elements in their way, and of figuring out ways to get to their food.  It is never simple, nor is it ever the same.

This made me think of what I was trying to say in yesterday’s blog.  I never think of myself as extremely intelligent, though I recognize that I have a way of thinking about problems that some of my more degreed family members never seem to grasp. It has continually amazed me at how one dimensionally a person trained in absorbing only what has been written seems to think and process what is happening in the present.

I, on the other hand, seem to process what happens as it is happening, without all prior knowledge to get in my way. I notice how people actually behave and operate in situations and how their emotions affect their circumstances, as well as how their circumstances affect their emotions, and then how that leads them to be able to change those circumstances or not. For someone who thinks life is already figured out and there is a right and wrong way to go about it, this is way off the mark and easily discounted.

For years I let that view of (my)life make me feel inferior. The longer I live, however, the more I notice that these skills of observation actually give me a feeling of confidence and lack of worry that the thinkers don’t have. My faith overrides their worry. It can’t be explained by mere principles, it just is. There will be no degree conferred from this knowledge, but it seems worthy of one, none the less.

The polar bear may have died from lack of both stimulation and lack of challenges for his intelligence. He needed to keep figuring things out with his mind, and in his caged environment the days were pretty much the same, one after another. This affected his mental state, which could very much have affected his physical state. When I said yesterday that I seemed to need challenges to prevent a slow death, I was grasping for that same piece of information. Some people, and some animals, will never be content with the status quo. They will continually see things that could be improved and try to make a difference. They need the juxtaposition of ideas and circumstances to give them an ever different perspective.

They need a continually changing landscape to their life. That certainly makes the twenty-some moves of my adult life make a bit more sense now, doesn’t it? Or perhaps they need people around them who constantly challenge their way of thinking and doing things, not ones who choose the comfort of doing them a certain way once and for all. That is why I feel like a rebel in some situations, though I know I am a peace maker at heart. The status quo,  in and of itself, will always challenge me to improve upon it, and I may always butt heads with those who are comfortable with it just the way it is.