Animal Lessons I

Daily Meditation — 4/28/2022

There are many times in your life where you face certainty or are filled with fear of the known.

Public speaking and difficult conversations with people are two such examples.

An immense dread hangs over your spirit like a lead cloak, weighing on you and making each moment and day all the more exhausting.

You stand on the sidelines as long as you can, hoping for things to just pass over you or for the problem to vanish…

Instead of facing it down.

Chickadees are remarkable birds.

They can survive the most harsh of weather and can even grow their brains, seasonally, for seed storage.

However, these tiny birds — hardly larger than a man’s thumb — are some of the only animals that will continue come to bird feeders…
…Even when humans are filling the feeders.

Crows, squirrels, sparrows, grackles…
They are flee in fear of the knowns presented by them. They live in the world with us, scurrying around our homes and clearly knowing many things about us, and yet are terribly afraid.

Chickadees, however, despite these facts, seem to face the fears — even if we are a thousand times their size.

Life will ever place knowns — and unknowns — in your way.
Illness and death of loved ones.
Challenging conversations.
Heartbreak and deceit.
We must not cower away in the shadows, hoping these things will pass us by. They will not — and it is foolish and naïve to ignore death, difficulty, and pain.

Be brave!

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These are distillations from my coming book “YouDaimonia: the Ancient Philosophy of Human Flourishing.”