Photo Credit — Lewis Hulbert / Wikimedia Commons
I had walked over to a neighbor’s to get his keys. I’ll be feeding his cats while he’s out of town this weekend and on the walk home, through Central Park in a light rain, I watched a particularly beautiful pigeon pecking around in the grass.
The feathers on this pigeon’s back formed an iridescent stained glass pattern. It was bewitching to watch the light change on those feathers.
And then the thought pinged into the front of my head: that pigeon will never know how beautiful its own back is. Throughout that pigeon’s short life it may experience many things including the intoxicating joy of swinging around in great, swooping arcs above the city — I sure hope they are having as much fun as I would be doing that — or finding that perfect pile of corn chips with no ants on them yet.
Because of its blind spot, not only will that pigeon never know how stunning its back is, it won’t have any way of knowing it has a back that’s different from its fellow pigeons.
The thoughts kept pinging (because that’s what happens in this head. All the time). This pigeon and all its mates also are completely in the dark about any number of things that seem to be of utmost importance to bipeds like you and me. Money, jobs, inflation, male pattern baldness. None of these things are keeping pigeons awake at night.
What are your blind spots? I’d love to run down a smart, concise, and insightful list of mine…but duh. They’re blind spots.
However with the advantage of not having died in my twenties — when I was doing the kinds of things that could have killed me — I am able to, well, see what my back looked like then if you will. I did not sport anything resembling stained glass window patterns. More Jackson Pollack than anything divine.
Because what else would I focus on?
The positive? The beautiful and unique? Please.
Here’s a radical idea. You can try this one yourself. Let’s go on about our business assuming the parts of us that we can’t see — but that others can — are beautiful and unique. We don’t have to get too full of ourselves here or anything. But let’s operate on the assumption that along with all our glaring character defects and that bit of toilet paper still stuck to our shoe, we are also sporting a stunning stained glass window array of “feathers” that others can see and admire.
Wait just a hot potato minute there, I hear you say (Yes, that’s what you said). Here’s what you said next: That’s nothing but the old fake-it-til-you-make-it ploy. You can’t fool me with that crap!
Maybe not. But don’t be too sure.
I’m ready to bet that a shockingly high number of the people in, ahem, leadership positions have long ago perfected believing they’ve got something magnificent going on that people find irresistible. And the more they project that belief the more the evidence points to it being true (yes, I’m thinking of — cough, cough — a certain failed real estate developer from Queens).
But, unlike our friends, the pigeons, we can either point and laugh when some preening fool tries to impress us with fake feathers or reassure anxious friends that their feathers are very real and very, very beautiful. And unique.
What we can’t do, though, is swing around in great, swooping arcs above the city.
The pigeons win.
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