This week I decided to take a picture of another bird house. The real reason was because I knew basically what to do, having done a similar setup last week and I had a second available bird and alternate tree. It should have been easier than it was, but the weather decided to pretend to be menacing without actually becoming inclement. It caused several breakages, multiple failed attempts and, ultimately, a solution that I didn’t exactly condone, but resorted to anyway to meet my self-imposed deadline.
On the subject of birds, the robins have been in the yard in great numbers and I found the body of a bird that hit the window and didn’t survive the impact. It seems that birds have been a topic on my mind this week, so I suppose it is a topic worth writing about.
Pop used to carry on conversations with the birds. I’m not entirely certain what spurred this behavior, needless to say it became a thing. The back yard often has birds. There are a number of fruit trees, which seem to be a favorite nesting or feeding place for birds. Once a humming bird made its tiny nest in one of the trees. It gave pop ample chances to communicate with the birds.
Sometimes he would just whistle at them as he was puttering around the yard. Other times, he would set up a chair and go sit in the sun and talk to whichever birds chose to chirp in the vicinity. Maybe that makes Pop a hipster, he was tweeting before it was cool.
While I was working on the bird picture, and having a really frustrating time with it, I thought about how Pop might have done things better than I was doing them. He used to spend hours building jigs and devices to help him do some masterful projects. With short deadlines (a week or less) for each picture, I don’t take the time to do that. The fact that I often don’t even have an idea what I’m going to do, is not conducive to the plan ahead and build tools to help line things up mentality.
Pop also just sat on a chair talking to the birds. The world has become rushed; I feel it in my projects, I feel it as I’m driving around running errands, I feel it in the expectation of next day shipping and fast food drive thrus. Sometimes it behooves us to intentionally slow things down. There are times we might benefit more from talking to the birds for a while than we would from madly rushing from one thing to another.
Even in the rush to get things done, sometimes it’s better to slow down and think things through and maybe do some planning or building a jig to help us do better work more efficiently. Go, go, go often leads to frustration and in today’s case, saying some very rude things to an apple tree. It is possible that slowing things down from time to time just to reset ourselves might actually benefit us. At the moment, I don’t know that I have the answer, maybe I will ask the birds.