There’s something a little funny about the moment your wife and kids realize you’ve become the guy who gets excited about birds.
- Not college football scores.
- Not stock prices.
- Not the latest Bad Bunny album
- Not whatever news headline was designed to spike my blood pressure
Birds.
Apparently, according to my family, the installation of a backyard bird feeder marks the official beginning of old age for me. And, to rub it in a little, they even bought me another, second bird feeder – this one with an AI-driven video camera built right in. I rolled my eyes… but it’s pretty damn cool.
I’ve now collected pictures and names for my new feathered friends:
- Zeke the Bluejay
- Paul the House Finch
- Francis the female Cardinal
- Moses the Brown Headed Cow Bird
- Thomas the Titmouse and;
- Doug the Mourning Dove.
Each with its own unique personality.
But, nevertheless, somewhere between upgrading to decent coffee beans and voluntarily teaching my wife about the differences between male and female finches, society has decided that I’ve crossed a threshold.
And maybe they’re right.
But I don’t think what’s happening to me is necessarily aging.
I think it’s better described as waking up and paying attention.
Every morning now, before the noise of the world fully boots up, I sit quietly on the back porch with a cup of coffee, an old pair of binoculars, and my Dad’s worn out copy of the Audubon bird book resting beside me. The pages are wrinkled and they smell faintly of dust and his old lake house. A few of his notes still live in the margins. Tiny underlines. Folded corners. Evidence that long before I ever sat here watching blue jays punk out every other bird in the yard, he did too.
There’s something deeply human about inheriting not just objects from our parents, but ways of seeing.
And lately, I’ve been seeing a whole lot more.
- The flash of blue wings cutting through gray morning light.
- The nervous precision of cowbirds and finches.
- The ridiculous confidence of cardinals.
- The red and white woodpeckers swooping in like tiny construction workers without hard hats.
And the strange thing is: the longer I watch them, the quieter my mind becomes.
Not empty. Just… less crowded.
Many of the conversations we’ve explored on The Story of Us have revolved around this idea that modern life has slowly severed us from the deeper rhythms that once grounded human beings. We’ve talked often about paying attention as a spiritual act. About being fully present. About the illusion that peace lives somewhere “out there” waiting for us on the other side of our next accomplishment, or our next Amazon purchase, maybe after checking off the latest life milestone.
But birds don’t seem particularly interested in any of that bullshit.
They arrive fully where they are.
There’s a Buddhist parable I find myself thinking about often while sitting there:
A bird sitting on a branch is never afraid of the branch breaking, because its trust is not in the branch, but in its own wings.
That feels especially important right now.
We spend so much of our lives gripping branches.
- Careers.
- Titles.
- Expectations.
- Bank accounts.
- Relationships.
- Certainties.
We convince ourselves these things are the source of our stability. But life has a habit of shaking branches. Illness comes. Loss comes. Change comes. Kids grow up and kids leave the nest. Entire identities we spent years constructing suddenly crack beneath our feet.
And yet the bird remains calm because the bird understands something we tend to forget as we race through life:
The branch was never the source of comfort and stability.
The wings were.
Inner peace can’t depend entirely on external conditions because external conditions are, by definition, temporary. Buddhism teaches this relentlessly through the principle of impermanence or “Anicca” — the understanding that everything changes, everything moves, everything dissolves and reforms endlessly. Forever… with no exceptions.
The birds seem to know this instinctively.
I’ve also noticed they don’t hide from the rain.
They don’t curse the storm or spiral into existential despair because conditions became inconvenient. They just calmly absorb what comes, shake off what they can, and continue being birds.
There’s wisdom in that.
Not the performative kind people post on Instagram with catchy captions set against sunset backgrounds. Real wisdom. The kind you feel in your chest when life has humbled you enough to finally sit down and listen.
Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh often spoke about looking deeply into nature — not as escape, but as reunion. If you observe carefully enough, the ordinary world begins revealing extraordinary truths. The flowers teach us impermanence. The clouds teach us transformation. The rivers teach us to surrender to the current.
And perhaps the birds teach trust.
- Trust in motion.
- Trust in resilience.
- Trust in continuing.
Watching them has become less of a hobby and more of a meditation practice disguised as bird watching.
Which, honestly, may be the best kind of spiritual practice there is.
Because it asks nothing from me except presence.
- No optimization.
- No productivity metrics.
- No performance.
Just stillness.
Maybe that’s what so many of us are actually starving for?
We don’t need more stimulation. We need more moments of noticing.
We don’t require louder lives. Our lives are loud enough as it is.
We require deeper, more authentic lives.
There’s a line we return to often at The Story of Us: that we aren’t separate from this universe observing itself — we are the universe becoming conscious of itself. Sitting on my porch in the early morning light, listening to wings flutter against the quiet, that idea suddenly stops feeling philosophical and starts feeling obvious.
The birds.
The rain.
The coffee steaming in my hands.
My father’s old book.
My wife laughing at me from inside the house.
None of it is separate.
It’s all connected.
All fleeting.
All sacred in its own ordinary but special way.
And perhaps growing older — if that’s what all of this is — isn’t about becoming less alive.
Maybe it’s finally learning how to pay attention.
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