The Heart of Endurance

Tag: birds

  • 72: Birds swimming with me

    This morning, I went to the beach with my wife.

    I was there for open-water swim training. From the shore, a yellow buoy marked the area where I was swimming. My wife stayed on land and took pictures while I trained.

    Later, she showed me one photograph.

    The lake filled almost the entire frame.

    Far away, I was barely visible—a tiny yellow point beside the buoy.

    Closer to the camera, two birds were quietly floating on the water.

    While I had been swimming, they had been swimming too.

    It was such a simple scene.

    Water.

    Wind.

    Birds.

    My wife on the shore.

    My body moving through the lake.

    Nothing extraordinary happened.

    Yet somehow the photograph felt deeply beautiful.

    Recently, I have been thinking about emotions as existing inside a room.

    When sadness, anger, disappointment, or grief becomes strong, it can occupy almost the entire room. We hear it everywhere. We analyze it. We argue with it. We try to remove it.

    But perhaps emotional healing does not always require the painful feeling to disappear.

    Perhaps we can simply make the room larger.

    The painful emotion no longer needs to leave. It simply becomes one part of something much larger.

    Looking at my wife’s photograph, I realized that perhaps the same principle could be described another way:

    Make the frame larger.

    When the frame is small, one painful event can fill the entire picture.

    But when the frame becomes wider, we begin noticing what else has been there all along.

    That morning, my training plan had numbers.

    Distance.

    Time.

    Pace.

    Heart rate.

    Those measurements are useful. They help me prepare and improve.

    But none of them could record the most meaningful part of the morning:

    I was swimming in the lake while my wife watched from shore, and birds quietly floated beside me.

    There is no metric for that.

    And yet years from now, I may remember the photograph more clearly than my swimming pace.

    Perhaps this is part of learning a different way of living.

    We spend much of life learning to recognize large signals: achievement, success, failure, recognition, problems.

    But ordinary life speaks much more quietly.

    A bird beside us.

    Trees moving in the wind.

    Someone we love waiting on the shore.

    A healthy body still able to move.

    A moment when nothing needs to be accomplished except being there.

    These things were probably always around us.

    The question is whether we had enough inner space to notice them.

    Pain can narrow our vision.

    But healing may gradually widen it again.

    Not by denying what hurts.

    Not by forcing gratitude to replace grief.

    But by allowing both to exist inside a larger landscape.

    Something painful may still be present.

    And something beautiful may be happening at exactly the same time.

    Perhaps we do not always need to remove what hurts.

    Sometimes we simply need to make the room larger.

    Make the landscape wider.

    Make the frame bigger.

    And then look again.

    We may discover that the painful thing is still there—but it is no longer the whole picture.

  • 70: The Geese Knew Where to Go

    This morning, I saw a group of geese walking across an open space.

    They were simply walking.

    Some were ahead.

    Some were behind.

    There was no perfect formation. No apparent urgency. They seemed to stop when they wanted to stop and move when they wanted to move.

    Watching them, a thought came to me.

    They do not care about politics.

    They do not care about recognition.

    They do not wonder whether someone approves of the direction they are going.

    They simply go where they need to go, at their own pace.

    Of course, human life is much more complicated.

    We have responsibilities.

    We have families.

    We work inside organizations.

    We need money.

    We make commitments to other people.

    We cannot simply walk away every time something becomes uncomfortable.

    But perhaps that is exactly why this simple scene stayed with me.

    For much of my life, I wanted to know where I was going.

    I chose a destination, created a plan, and concentrated my energy on getting there.

    That way of living served me well.

    But perhaps there are seasons when we do not need to know the entire destination.

    Perhaps we only need to know the direction of the next few steps.

    What gives me peace?

    What quietly gives me energy?

    Where do I feel most like myself?

    Which relationships do I want to protect?

    What am I curious about?

    What is my body telling me?

    Where is unnecessary noise consuming energy that could be used somewhere more meaningful?

    These questions do not always give us a five-year plan.

    Sometimes they simply point toward the next few feet.

    And perhaps that is enough.

    The geese also seemed completely unconcerned about pace.

    Some walked faster.

    Some slowly.

    Occasionally the distance between them became larger.

    Yet they continued moving.

    I realized how much of human life is spent comparing pace.

    Am I progressing quickly enough?

    Am I behind someone else?

    Should I have accomplished more by now?

    Even during transitions, we can create another competition: How quickly can I discover my next purpose?

    But perhaps there is no prize for crossing a bridge quickly.

    Sometimes we need to walk.

    Sometimes we need to stop.

    Sometimes we need to sit quietly and look around.

    And sometimes we may simply follow a signal without knowing exactly where it leads.

    There was one more thing I noticed.

    The geese were moving individually, but they were not alone.

    They traveled together without appearing to require everyone to move in exactly the same way.

    Perhaps that is another picture of a good life.

    We can have our own direction and our own pace while still walking beside people we love.

    We do not need identical paths to share part of the journey.

    Eventually, the geese continued on, and I continued with my morning.

    They probably had no idea that they had taught me anything.

    But perhaps that is what happens when we become quiet enough to notice.

    Ordinary moments begin to speak.

    And the message I heard that morning was simple:

    You do not need to know the entire path.

    Listen for the next direction.

    Move at your own pace.

    And do not spend too much energy worrying about who is watching.

    Sometimes the next step is enough.