Brushing my teeth this morning by the open bathroom window, I caught sight of something moving in the garden. Clinging to the handle of my garden fork in the vegetable patch was a specht – a Great Spotted Woodpecker. These are shy birds you don’t often see, so it was moment of excitement to spot the distinctive black and white body and bobbing red head so close. For a whole minute, I watched the woodpecker crawling adeptly around the wooden shaft of the fork, assessing its surroundings, before it suddenly took flight towards the copse behind the house. I smiled to myself quietly, having borne witness to nature’s beauty in such a peaceful moment.

Reader, that is not actually what happened. Here’s what actually happened.

Within seconds of spotting the woodpecker, my twenty-first century instincts took over. “Take a picture!” my mind silently screamed. I quickly finished brushing my teeth, then bolted through to the living room to get my phone. In the rush back to the bathroom, my big toe met the half-open living room door with the force of a hammer on a nail. A split second later, the pain started radiating and I let out a loud four-letter expletive. My mind turned back to the woodpecker outside, and I limped through to the bathroom to see if it was still there outside the window. As luck would have it, it was, but as I lifted my phone in an effort to capture the scene, I dropped my phone out the window. The bird was spooked and vanished in the blink of an eye. “For God’s sake”, or words to that effect, I uttered. So there I was, standing in the bathroom, big toe throbbing with red hot pain, phone lying on the gravel outside. I was feeling a new emotion – anger.

Let’s just recap what happened here: I saw a cool bird in the garden. Within seconds I stopped looking at the bird and went to look for my phone instead. Hurrying, rushing back to get a photo, and ended up smashing my toe in, dropping my phone, and scaring the woodpecker off in my calamitous rage. Looking at it logically, that’s all a bit crazy, isn’t it?

I’ve seen stories in recent years about artists banning mobile phone photography from their music concerts. Images of a sea of people standing metres away from their idol, with their eyes fixated not on the performance, but on the screen of their phone, are easy to laugh at for their absurdity. And yet here I am, ruining moments at home in a desperate dash to bottle up a moment in time that’s unfolding right before my very eyes, if only I would look at it.

Why did I do it? I don’t know. I think I was acting subconsciously – a momentary collapse of self-awareness. I think I recognised a special moment and wanted to capture it for posterity, and possibly to send the picture to family and friends and share it on social media. I thought the woodpecker in my garden would look good on Instagram, and might even get a few likes. Who doesn’t like that sort of validation from their friends? On the face of it, totally harmless. But was it? I stubbed my toe. The bird flew away. The phone could have been damaged. And I got angry and disappointed. I think the last bit there is most jarring, as I reflect. How did a special moment make me angry instead of happy?

When faced with a new situation, especially when we recognise an urgency attached to it, we sometimes act irrationally. Professor Steve Peters in his book The Chimp Paradox calls it the “chimp brain” – it’s an evolutionary feature of the human brain which is meant to protect us from threats. The “chimp brain” in Peters’ model is driven by emotion and impulsivity rather than logic, which he calls the “human”. You cannot get rid of your chimp and instead must learn to manage it. I bought The Chimp Paradox as an audiobook, and I thoroughly recommend it. I think the woodpecker incident is an example of what can happen when your “chimp brain” is in charge of a situation that it shouldn’t have been in charge of.  Or maybe it wasn’t. I don’t know.

Whatever it was, this wee incident caused me to reflect enough to want to write down my thoughts. Whatever you want to call these thought processes, I think it comes down to being self-aware, and that is often undoubtedly easier said than done. Reflection is a form of self-awareness, and is certainly important, but in-the-moment self-awareness is a harder state to master.

So what now? Probably nothing. That’s it. Story over.

Or perhaps next time I see something cool, I’ll try and stop myself. I’ll think twice before reaching for my phone. Maybe I’ll take a photo, and maybe I won’t – sometimes a moment is meant to be a moment, and nothing more.

I just wish the pain of a stubbed toe only lasted a moment.