It Fell Out of the Sky.
Loki and I were out for a walk when something caught our attention. I heard it hit the pavement. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw it fall.
Loki raced over to see what it was. It looked a bit like a twig from a distance, but the way Loki was running to it, I realized it must be moving.
Assuming it was an errant frog just before the storm that was circling above, I tugged Loki back. He enjoys playing with frogs. But something didn’t feel right to me.
I really thought I’d seen it fall. So I looked up before I looked down. There were no tree branches, nothing above me at all. A car had passed a minute earlier, but there was no car now. In fact there was … nothing.
It fell out of the sky.
Then I looked down and realized it was a bird – a tiny sparrow. It was obviously dying, twitching in ways I don’t want to describe. It took less than a minute before it stopped moving completely.
I prayed for its soul because I didn’t know what else I could do.
Was there anything I could do? Could I have saved this bird? Where did it even come from?
I considered the possibilities. Maybe I hadn’t noticed a bolt of lightning. I hadn’t seen any lightning, but the whole world was black, even though it was only late afternoon. Thunder was rolling; there could have been lightning I hadn’t seen. Maybe the lightning hit the bird instead of hitting me or my dog. Maybe that bird saved my life.
Or maybe there was a hawk flying overhead; hawks have been known to grab other birds for dinner. Maybe the hawk got spooked and somehow dropped an injured bird. But I didn’t see a hawk, or even a shadow, and it fell so close to me. It seemed unlikely.
Or maybe the bird just … stopped. Maybe it had some kind of bird ailment, like a human heart attack, and it was just flying along and then – wham – it dropped out of the air in mid-flight. Maybe it was perfectly happy, having a great day, and then suddenly – its life was over.
As much as I didn’t want the bird to be dead, I mostly didn’t want the bird to suffer. And I thought that if it were just flying along – not being carried by a hawk or threatened by a storm – merrily flapping its wings and enjoying its life…. I thought maybe that would be the best way to go.
I thought of my life, much of it spent sitting around staring at a screen, when there’s a whole world to explore. When my last moment comes, I’d rather be flapping my wings and looking around, enjoying the breeze, than worrying about predators and lightning. And since I’m not a bird, I have that option.
I don’t have to just … sit because I don’t know what might happen. I don’t have to be debilitated by my fears, but sometimes I am. I have choices; I can do things.
I don’t have to fly, but I can do something. In fact, I can do virtually anything. I could jump out of a plane, write a love letter, swim in a lake, polish my coin collection, create a new song, take a painting class, travel, go on safari, go on a scavenger hunt, go grocery shopping. I can do anything.
That bird reminded me that any moment might be my last. I’d like my moments to matter.
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I’ll be doing some moment-gathering in the next couple of weeks, so my blog will have to wait. I hope my faithful readers will come back in July for some more installments, even if there is no breathless anticipation for those reading moments to occur.