Why the Anteater?

And what an unlikely animal from Argentina can teach us about rewilding a life.

When we started thinking about Rewild Your Life, we knew we didn't want the obvious mascot. Not a lion roaring from a mountaintop or an eagle soaring overhead. We kept coming back to something much stranger: the anteater.

It's awkward-looking, independent, curious and surprisingly formidable. It wanders. It follows what interests it. It moves through the world at its own peculiar pace. And, perhaps best of all, one of the popularly cited collective names for a group of anteaters is a parade.

Technically, giant anteaters are mostly solitary animals, so you aren't likely to stumble across an actual parade of them. But somehow, that makes us love the idea even more. Because maybe your parade doesn't have to mean everyone moving through life together. Maybe your parade is simply your people — the ones who celebrate you, gather around a table, wander alongside you for a while, disappear into their own lives and find their way back again.

An Animal That Has Actually Been Rewilded

There's a deeper reason we chose the anteater.

Giant anteaters once roamed the enormous Iberá wetlands of northern Argentina, but hunting and habitat loss eventually caused them to disappear from the region. Then, in 2007, conservationists began an ambitious project to bring them back.

The giant anteater became the first locally extinct mammal targeted for reintroduction as part of Iberá's larger rewilding effort. Many of the animals used to rebuild the population were orphaned or rescued elsewhere in Argentina, rehabilitated and gradually released. More than 90 were released during the project's first 13 years, and healthy populations now live in Iberá again. (Rewilding Argentina)

Something that had disappeared from a landscape belonged there again.

And that might be our favorite definition of rewilding.

Because maybe rewilding your life isn't about reinventing yourself. Maybe it's about asking: What used to live here that I've lost?

Curiosity. Friendship. Movement. Adventure. Long dinners. Making things. Being outside. Rest. Music. Travel. Doing something for absolutely no productive reason whatsoever.

Sometimes a life doesn't need to be demolished and rebuilt. Sometimes it just needs its native species returned.

Lessons From a Very Strange Animal

The more we learned about giant anteaters, the more appropriate our unlikely mascot became.

For starters, they're wonderfully uninterested in looking impressive. They can grow six to eight feet long, have no teeth, walk on their knuckles to protect enormous claws, and have tongues that can reach roughly two feet long. (Smithsonian's National Zoo)

They are objectively ridiculous. They're also extremely good at being anteaters.

There's something refreshing about that in a world where so much of adult life becomes performance — looking successful, having the right house, taking the right vacation, getting the promotion and optimizing our calendars, bodies, careers and even our leisure.

You don't have to look impressive while living a life that works for you.

Anteaters also navigate largely through an extraordinary sense of smell, using it to investigate the world around them. That feels like another useful reminder: you don't always have to know exactly where you're going. Pay attention instead. What interests you? Who makes you laugh? Where do you linger? What makes you lose track of time?

Follow that.

And here's perhaps our favorite anteater fact: despite eating thousands of ants and termites every day, a giant anteater doesn't stay at one mound and completely destroy it. It eats a relatively small amount and moves along.

Take something. Enjoy it. Leave something. Move along. Come back another day. Not everything needs to be maximized, monetized or exhausted.

Find Your Parade

So yes, we picked the anteater partly because of Argentina and partly because its real-life return to Iberá so beautifully captures what rewilding can mean. But we also chose it because this wonderfully odd animal reminds us of the kind of life we're trying to build.

One where you don't have to live like everybody else. You don't have to move at everybody else's pace. You can wander, investigate, protect your space, carry the people you love and leave some of the anthill for tomorrow.

And you can be fiercely independent while still having a parade.

Because things that have disappeared from a life aren't necessarily gone forever. Sometimes they simply need the right conditions to return.

Bring some of the wild back. Follow your curiosity. Find your parade. Rewild your life.