Just Fly Forward

You won’t believe what happened to me!  I was home sitting at my desk working by my window, when I heard a weird sound.  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something fly past me. It took a few minutes to register but it was a small bird!  At first I panicked but soon I realized that I needed to get that bird our of my house (and make sure it didn’t poop all over the place).  Luckily, my son was home and heard the commotion so he was already coming to help.  We decided to corner the bird and lead him to the one room in the house that had no window screens. That would be our target room.

I did my best to corner that bird.  But every time I got close, it started frantically flying in the wrong direction! I chased that darn bird for a good 15 minutes. I finally got the bird to the target room and he flew towards the (very large) open windows.  Yay!  It would be leaving my house right?  WRONG!  That bird flew everywhere in the room but straight out the windows.  It flew to the wall near the windows.  It flew towards the ceiling. It even flew close to the ground.  I didn’t understand it.  This bird managed to fly into my house through a 2 inch hole in a window screen but couldn’t seem to fly out of one of the two wide open almost floor to ceiling windows right in front of it!  I found myself yelling at the bird, “JUST FLY FORWARD!”

After what seemed like an eternity, the bird finally managed to fly out of the window.  It really was unbelievable.  It made me think of something.  Sometimes we can have an opportunity right in front of us to change our situation but we don’t take it.  Situations, I may add, that we had no problem jumping into even though we no we had no business being in that situation in the first place (mm-hmm, you know what I am talking about).  Instead of taking the opportunity to escape, we make things way more complicated than they have to be.  We start telling ourselves that we need to “get ready first” or “find the right time”.  Let me help you (and me):  We will never be ready and there will never be a right time.   If we make a mistake we will learn from it.  But what if things actually go well? We won’t know unless we try.  Do we really want to be like that bird? Flying all over the place when the opportunity we are looking for is right in front of us – doors (or windows) wide open?  All we have to do is JUST FLY FORWARD and see what happens.  So, what are we waiting for?  We may surprise ourselves at what we can actually do!