Marking your Territory

Ah, the comfort of home. I'm sitting at my computer, freshly showered, shirtless, drinking a Laphroig scotch-no ice. I've got Leonard Cohen strumming out of my speakers and my bed beckoning with a fat copy of Anna Karenina about halfway read. Carpet freshly vacuumed massages my recently climbing shoe cramped feet.

I'm sure glad I'm not a consultant. We just started using consultants to address some of our capacity shortcomings. One guy that I work with, David, commutes daily to his company's apartment in Manhatten, and bi-weekendly back home to Toronto. Today he remarked to me how much of a pleasure it is to return back to your own sheets. I wonder what other amenities of home he misses.

There's an amazing peace in creating a nest of your own. I read an interesting book, The Life of Pi which deals with, among other things, zoology. It remarks at how the home is an effort to bring together all the necessities that in the wild are located far away. Running water replaces the river for drinking, bathing, and cleaning. The stove replaces the fire. The walls around you the cave. No need to roam the wide savannas to hunt or to forage through the forest when it's all in your pantry.

Interestingly, the book remarks how, to be a successful zookeeper, it is necessary to recreate an animal's natural surroundings. As animals are creatures of routine, the animal must have all the important things mentioned above, albeit in a smaller radius. And that smaller radius, too, is an issue as animals have a prescribed "comfort zone" that when breached will cause them to move away in order to re-establish it or as a last resort, attack. In any case, successful management of these will result in the animal drinking and eating. A job very well done will result in the animal being well adjusted, falling into its normal routine of waking, hunting/gathering, and sleeping. The ultimate success, of course, is procreation. Heh. Martha Stewart never mentioned that as a benchmark on her show.

And I suppose human beings are no different. Not that I've procreated yet, mind you.