Day 9: In flight

Last week, I was driving home from work and as I stopped at a red light on a hill, I watched these birds flying around in formation around the steeple of a church. They were swooping and dipping and circling around, and yet somehow all managed to stay together in what appeared to be a beautifully choreographed dance in the sky.

I was captivated by what I was seeing, but at the same time I thought to myself, If I were a bird, it is doubtful I would be able to stay with my fellow birds. I would be the one flying in the wrong direction, soaring up when the others were swooping low, I would take this delicate and beautiful thing and I would take away the synchronization and make it clunky and jerky instead.

Because that’s what I do.

And I’m not even really sure what I meant by that – is it that I don’t have the grace (uh, where’d that bruise on my knee come from anyway?)? Is it that I just don’t want to follow the rest of the crowd? That routine and sameness bores me?

I don’t really know. It was just this overwhelming feeling, while watching the birds that I would be the one doing it wrong, I’d be out of “step” (flap? wing?) somehow. That somehow amidst this beauty and wonder, there I’d be, making a mess of things.

It’s been one of those weeks, a week where I’ve felt out of step, a week full of stress and feeling sensitive. A week where I have felt…less than… in so many ways. It’s a horrible feeling, that feeling of “not good enough” – that feeling where you don’t measure up or compare, once it gets ingrained in your thinking, it’s hard to banish it, until your brain is so consumed by it, this not-good-enough-ness that you can’t imagine how anyone could see any good in you ever, at all.

Yeah. One of those weeks.

I wonder if those birds feel like that with their swooping and dipping and circling the sky. If one of those birds ever thinks to itself in its wee bird brain, “Maaaaaaaaan, it’s cold out here, I’m freaking exhausted and I think there is someone tossing breadcrumbs in that park down there a few miles back. I’m so over this!”? Are they content to circle and swoop and not veer from the pattern or are they longing to escape it.

Because that would be me. Don’t make me circle. Don’t make me keep on keeping on. Let me land for a few minutes and rest my wings. Let me catch my breathe and take a break from flight. I would be the tired bird, of that I have no doubt.

What am I even saying here?

I don’t know.

Birds are a bunch of conformists and I’ve had a bad week. I guess that’s it.

Don’t be a bird.

Or be one.

I don’t care.

(How many more days of writing every day do I have left?)