On moose, dead foxes, and perception
A tale of shifting seasons
It’s autumn in Finland. Leaves are slowly falling from the trees, fields are turning yellow, then brown, lights are fading. Like many others, I’ve been trying to squeeze in a few last ‘hurrah’s’ before the looming darkness of winter arrives - spending time in nature, at the quintessential place of Finnish countryside life: the mökki.
My trips have taken me to Eastern Finland, where my family is from, and where various family members still reside and have their mökkis. I have driven up and down those roads for years, always passing by the ever-present moose-crossing warning signs. But in all this time, I’d only ever seen one in the far distance. Until recently.
Two weeks ago, I was driving home, when suddenly, I spotted one. Here it was, the infamous wild beast, right beside the road, just a little bit further ahead of me. The car in front of me was driving right past it as I first saw it.
Terrified, I slowed down - even though I was still a safe distance away, I know that colliding with one of these majestic animals can be deadly, and I wasn’t taking any chances.
The moose watched the first car drive by, looked in my direction, and then seemed to decide that it preferred the forest to car-watching after all, and disappeared amongst the trees.
I stuck to my slow speed, well beyond the point where the moose had been. What if there were more - what if I was driving through the latest moose-hangout-land? With my heart still pumping, I didn’t remember that moose are solitary. My journey continued smoothly - no more wildlife in sight.
Last weekend, I was once again sitting in a car, driving into the countryside, with my husband at the steering wheel this time. As we were passing some fields on our right, he commented “that’s a very weird looking lonely cow in that field” - just to realise a moment later, that we were, in fact, looking at a moose. We shared a moment of laughter at his initial impression of “a funny cow with strangely big horns”, and I didn’t think more of that.
After a wonderful weekend with glorious weather, mushroom picking and kayaking on lakes, we were once again back in the car to go home. If at this point you’re thinking - let me guess, she saw another moose? - you’d be right. I shrieked “moose!!” at its sight - a majestic brute, not by the side of the road, but this time, right in the middle. I wanted my husband to slow down immediately - who cares we were still far enough. After all, if hit by a car, a moose’s body doesn’t just hit the hood - because of its long legs, it crashes straight into the windshield, potentially fatally injuring the front passengers. Unbothered by the approaching car, the moose was clearly quite confident in what is his territory.
My husband obliged and slowed down, and once again after contemplating the slowly approaching vehicle for a moment, the moose decided to grant us our way, and disappeared into the forest.
At this point, I couldn’t help but be struck by the fact that I had seen three moose within a space of two weeks - when before I had only ever seen one in my entire life. Another thought popped into my head: What does this mean? Could the moose be… a sign? And we’ll get to whether or not such a thing as “signs” even exist in a moment. But first - let’s have some fun.
Moose are powerful, solitary, and calm by nature. They represent a quiet, inner strength that isn’t flashy, but holds its power in its slow, dignified unwaveringness. In mythology, they often exemplify wisdom and protection. In Nordic folklore in particular, they’re associated with a connection to nature and our instincts. An encounter with moose would be an invitation to look within, to trust one’s inner voice.
As I was contemplating this symbolism, the forest (or fate - or randomness) threw me another twist: a dead fox by the side of the road. Recent roadkill, for I could still clearly make out the whole shape and head of the creature, not yet privy to the ruthless course of nature that brings decomposition and a return to earth.
Every time I see a lump on or beside the road, I am drawn to the sight with a mixture of hope and dread - hope that it is just a log or part of a busted tire; dread that it is an animal whose journey ended because of someone else’s.
I wish as a society, we could figure out how to keep our precious wildlife safe.
By the time we got home, I had seen two more recently killed foxes. Besides the absurdity of unnecessary deaths, I was starting to feel something else - intrigue at the cadence I had just observed.
Three moose, within the space of two weeks. Followed by three dead foxes, in the space of a few hours.
There is a contrast here, on more levels than one - life and death, wisdom and cunning, slow strength and quick wit.
What is going on?
If I was so inclined, I could easily think that the universe was having a little joke at my expense.
You see, I am a scientist who recently trained as a yoga teacher. As a scientist, I used to live in the world of foxes: a world where rationality, sharp intellect, precision and quick thinking dominate. But yoga - true yoga, and not just asana (the physical practice) - invites us to face what’s beyond that world: our inner wisdom, our connection to and place within the wider world. Yoga invites us to slow down. To learn how to live with embodied presence - and not just in our heads, where our intellect lies. To find our inner strength. In other words, yoga invites us into the realm of the moose.
It’s as if nature was using my roadtrips to enact the story of my life. Maybe even… to let me know that my stepping away from purely academic science and into the unknown world of writing, sharing how both science and yoga can help us lead better lives, has brought me to exactly where I’m supposed to be. Maybe nature is telling me… I am on the right path.
And what a beautiful tale that would be.
But… if I’m being completely honest, I don’t really believe that nature - or the universe, or whatever it is you want to call it - is sending me signs or hidden messages. Rather, I think the fact that I even noticed these animals, and that my mind was drawn to a story around them being signs, is an indicator of an interesting shift in my own thinking.
The mind is a wondrous thing, equipped with amazing tools that help us make sense of the world and allow us to survive, and even thrive. But under the hood, beneath the storylines our consciousness tells us, are shortcuts that are prone to all sorts of quirks.
Take the recurring theme of the number 3 - 3 (live) moose, 3 (dead) foxes. What the number 3 really represents, is a cluster. It’s the smallest amount of things that, when they occur together, we notice their togetherness: we notice them as a cluster. But here’s the thing: statistically speaking, it is much more likely for events to happen in clusters than for them to be evenly spaced out. Plane crashes are another example of this - ever felt like they seem to happen in clusters of 3? It’s counterintuitive, but even spacings between events is actually rarer. Even spacing is what requires order; randomness produces clusters - not the other way around. So statistically speaking, the fact that I observed these animals in clusters is actually a high indicator of the random nature of their appearances.
There is also a well-studied phenomenon in cognitive science called the “Baader-Meinhoff effect”, or also known as the frequency illusion. Once you notice something - like when I noticed the moose, or the first dead fox - suddenly, you start seeing that everywhere. Once something is at the forefront of our minds, that ‘something’ (as well as any closely related things) will draw our attention much more easily than anything unrelated. This has been shown in Psychology experiments as well: when you’ve just seen the word “doctor”, you react much faster to the word “nurse” than to the word “tree”, because both doctor and nurse come from a shared concept - healthcare professionals - and once that is on your mind, your mind jumps to related things quickly and easily.
Given that moose are somewhat rare, I doubt that this effect explains my encounters with them - but with the dead foxes on my way home, this could easily have happened. Similarly, chances are that there were other dead animals by the side of the road, or other items that could’ve been laced with a different meaning. But thanks to a quirk called ‘confirmation bias’, my mind quickly and smoothly shut these out of my perception, because it didn’t fit with the dramatic narrative that was building in my head.
My recent immersion in yoga philosophy also means that spiritual interpretations are much more at the forefront of my mind, thanks to a cognitive bias called ‘the recency bias’: whatever information you have been recently exposed to is more readily available (hence it also being called the ‘availability heuristic’). I genuinely find yoga philosophy fascinating, even though I don’t necessarily believe in the more spiritual interpretations. (I think there is plenty of room for more secular interpretations, but that’s a discussion for another time.) But the mere exposure I have had to these ideas means that they come to my mind more readily - thus in a way creating a self-fulfilling prophecy: my world becomes more spiritual not because it is, but because that’s the lens that’s more available to my mind.
Spiritual interpretations are particularly rife with symbolic thinking and anthropomorphism: the tendency to project human traits onto non-human animals and objects, and create stories around these traits. The moose and foxes were drawn into the theatrical stage of my mind, where they became the main characters in my personal development myth. Infused with agency, meaning and the harbouring of messages, my mind made them into more than just wildlife doing their thing.
Last but not least, us humans are hardwired to notice patterns - even in noise, where there is none. But if it wasn’t for our ability to notice patterns, we wouldn’t be able to learn anything meaningful either. Newton wouldn’t have noticed that the apple kept falling from the tree in a predictable way, that gravity explains not just the movement of that what is falling, but the trajectory of our planets and stars. Alexander Fleming wouldn’t have discovered penicillin, hadn’t he noticed that mold growing on his bacteria dishes reliably killed the bacteria, thus creating a cure that has saved thousands of lives. And maybe a bit more banally, but no less importantly: if we hadn’t learned to jump and flee at the sound of rustling leaves, even if it was just the wind, we probably would’ve been eaten by lions. We could have died out before we ever got out of the savannah and into the wide world, to conquer it, and become the most dominant species this planet has seen thus far. Ultimately, our brain’s tendency to favour false positives is a safety mechanism - better to jump at the wind than to end up a lion’s snack - but one that can make us perceive things that aren’t there.
Us humans are natural storytellers - and with the tale I just shared, I’m quite the case in point. (At least, so I hope). Just because I’ve laid out all the reasons why my tale most likely isn’t real, doesn’t mean it can’t be meaningful. Call me a cynic, but I don’t believe that life inherently has any meaning - I believe it is up to us to give it some. To me, that isn’t sad, but probably the most magical thing there is about life.
Does it really matter what it means that I saw what I did? If sightings of moose and dead foxes make me reflect on my personal journey and what it means to be a scientist who also trained in yoga - is that a bad thing? I know that by writing this story about signs and the underlying mental processes, using myself as both a subject and an object of observation, I may end up alienating myself from both scientific and spiritual audiences. The latter will likely think, “giiirl, you’re so close, the universe IS talking to you, if only you knew how to truly listen!” - while the former will likely shrug and say, “well, she clearly lost her marbles somewhere along the way.”
But here I am, writing and sharing about this anyway, because I believe that there is a middle ground. The fact that I can now see both stories - the mystical one, and the scientific one - is, to me, an enrichment. Just as in nature, there is a place for both moose and foxes, each fulfilling their roles in separate but interconnected ecological niches, I think there is space in life for both science and spirituality. We seem to live in a world of polarities, of one or the other. But here I am, hoping that maybe, just maybe, there is a silent majority who agrees that there is a way to see both. Who understands and appreciates where I am coming from. And maybe, just maybe, through me having put my words on this - someone out there feels that little bit less alone, and that little bit more seen.
The inspiration for this story came to me as I was preparing to go to sleep, the night of that ‘fateful drive’ with the third moose and the three foxes. The toothpaste was already on my toothbrush, I was about to start - when suddenly the words spilled into my head. They couldn’t wait, not even for as short a task as brushing my teeth. So I set my toothbrush back down, careful to balance it in such a way that it wouldn’t tilt to the side and spill the toothpaste, and went to my journal to jot down the first draft paragraphs of this story.
Later in bed, teeth brushed, about to fall asleep, I had another sudden realisation. I had taken out a new PJ t-shirt earlier. I had dug out my Lapland t-shirt, not really thinking much about why it was this particular one I was drawn to. Lying there, my husband gently snoring on one side, my toddler sleeping in his crib on the other, you know what I remembered is printed on the t-shirt I was wearing?
A moose.
Photo credits:
Mökki picture: Tomi Blasic on Unsplash
Moose road sign: public domain, issued by a Finnish public body
Cow with moose antlers: AI generated using Substack’s built-in image generator
Solitary moose in the forest: AI generated using Substack’s built-in image generator
Photo of a fox: Xiangkun ZHU on Unsplash