Even Ducks Could Fly

Dearest gentle readers. How are youuu? Thank you for clicking to read.

You know, something rather profound happened this morning on my way to work.

Well, perhaps “profound” is a strong word for it, because it involved a duck.

Yes, a duck.

A flying duck.

I saw one flying this morning, and for some reason, I stopped to watch. And then I had the strangest thought: even ducks could fly.

It sounds like the most normal thing in the world. But for some reason, seeing it happen made me stop and look twice.

It was actually flying through the air for a little while. Not waddling around, or sitting on water, or doing whatever ducks normally do when we are not paying attention to them.

Flying.

And my second thought was almost embarrassing: How could I not know ducks could fly like that?

Of course, somewhere in my brain, that information existed. Ducks are birds. Birds fly. That is basic information. Even a child could tell you that.

But knowing something and seeing it for yourself after a very long time are two different things.

It was a very small thing, but it got me thinking about how often we decide what something can or cannot do based on what we have seen before.

We see something happen the same way enough times, and eventually, we stop expecting anything different.

We see a person who is quiet and assume they cannot lead. We see someone who has failed a few times and assume they are not capable. We see someone who has never done something before and assume they probably cannot do it.

Sometimes we do the same thing to ourselves...

We look at the person we have been for the last few years and assume that person is the person we will always be.

I think that is one of the strange things about being us… humans.

We are constantly using the past to predict the future.

And most of the time, it makes sense. Because if something has happened ten times in exactly the same way, it is reasonable to expect the eleventh time to be similar.

But perhaps we should be careful about letting what we think we know convince us that we know everything. We shouldn’t underestimate how much of ourselves we have never actually met.

There are parts of us that only appear when we encounter situations we have never encountered before. You can spend years thinking you know exactly who you are, only to find yourself in a situation that asks something of you that you didn’t know you had.

Sometimes, we meet a version of ourselves simply because life gives us no reason to remain the person we have always been.

And perhaps that is why I have become a little uncomfortable with the way we describe ourselves.

Because I have been there before. There were times I had looked at myself and thought, That is just not me.

Not because I tried and failed, or because someone tested me and told me I could not do it, but simply because I had decided.

I looked at the people who seemed comfortable doing something and thought they were made differently from me. I looked at people who seemed brave and assumed I was not brave. I looked at people who knew exactly what they wanted and wondered why I had never been like that.

But how do we know what we are like when we have only ever been ourselves in the situations we have already experienced?

I remembered where I was working last year.

My boss believed in me so much, even when I couldn’t see what he was seeing. At the time, I didn’t always understand why he trusted me with certain things or why he seemed so sure that I could handle them.

But over time, I started doing things I never thought I could do. And somewhere along the way, something changed. I found a fire in me that I didn’t even know I had.

And though I no longer work there, I have my boss to thank for bringing out that part of me. Truly, sometimes, all it takes is for someone else to see something in you… even when, to you, it feels completely random.

The duck did not suddenly become something else. It had always been capable of flying. I was the one who had failed to think about that part of it because of the version I had grown used to seeing.

And I think that is what I want us to take from this today: we should be careful about calling something impossible when all we really mean is that we have never seen it happen.