Strange Birds - Nov 20 2021

 

Strange Birds

Nov 20 2021

Birds go south in winter.

But some stay,

either hardy and resourceful

or just plain stubborn,

homebodies, like me

who are leery of change.

And some go astray,

poorly raised

blown off course

fooled by weather.

The outliers,

who fly their own idiosyncratic path

until eventually coming to land

in some unimagined place.

Humans, the same.

The snowbirds fleeing winter.

The curmudgeons, staying home.

And the oddballs and eccentrics

who break new ground.

Who seem oblivious to raised eyebrows

and knowing smirks

and the likelihood they'll fail.

And who, inexplicably, seem happier than the rest of us,

project this ingenuous integrity

we can only envy.

Yet it's the strange birds

who will ensure their species' survival

evade catastrophe,

from climate change

to a devastation of plague.

And the mavericks among us

who will also lead us out.

Who think outside the box.

Whose fertile minds

and outlandish thoughts

most often go nowhere,

but sometimes take your breath away.

For them

no simple inertia 

or mindless conforming.

No sun-soaked idle.

No complacent hibernation

in the comfort of home.

You can tell who they are.

Their sweetly scattered style

heedless of fashion.

Their racing minds

ranging far and wide.

And just get them started

to see the sparkle in their eyes

as they share their latest ideas,

travelling solo

as they pull us along in their wake.

A celebration of eccentricity. Of non-conformists, odd balls, original thinkers. Not only are they the ones who think outside the box, and ultimately lead us not to innovation as well as whole new fields of thought, they appear to do well by it. A study of that strangely appealing stereotype, the English eccentric, revealed them to be on average much happier than the rest of us.

I'm hardly leading my fellow humans anywhere, and would never claim to be a brave new innovator. And I may be less happy than average, not more. But I am eccentric. I once came up with the nickname of “long tail”, by which I meant the long tail of the normal distribution curve. This is where I repeatedly find myself, in so many categories of personality and temperament and preference. So it was nice to be able to come up with a poem about eccentricity.

If it seems odd, then, that I categorized myself as among the complacent rather than the free thinkers, it's more a comment on my extreme homebody tendencies than anything else. A kind of eccentricity of its own, I suppose.

I couldn't resist those two highly topical examples of environmental change. After all, when you are living through unprecedented climate change and a once in a century pandemic all at once, the idea of resilience is certainly top of mind!

Although the poem didn't begin with eccentricity. Rather, I glanced at a piece about Snowbirds (Canadians who travel south for the winter) and for some reason thought I'd noodle around with the idea. My mind quickly turned to a literal take on the word, and then to those rare sightings of off-course migrators: exotic birds seen in improbable places. My knowledge of natural history tells me that these kinds of mistakes are essential: that they represent the biological diversity that is nature's strength, that provides her with resilience. Because when the environment changes, it's this rich depository of genetic variation that permits quick adaptation.

Which means that conformity is death. Purity is unnatural. And mistakes are the engine of evolution. If DNA always transcribed perfectly, life would have been stuck as primitive single cells. We need outliers. So don't stigmatize and ostracize your local eccentric. Don't just tolerate. Celebrate her instead!