Birds and a One-Inch Picture Frame

Life for me, a confused 20-year-old, at times feels like a massive rock I'm trying to push up an insurmountable mountain. I feel like that guy, Sisyphus maybe, in one of those Greek myths – sentenced to pushing a rock up a mountain, only to have it roll back again and again, a tragic tale of the futility of hard labor.

Lately, though, I have been trying to view the future not quite so bleakly...

After reading Anne Lamott's book, Bird by Bird, which was about writing and not at all, really, about life counseling, I've been trying to adopt a philosophy of life that reflects the way she chooses to write - by short assignments.

After a jaunt through the panicked day-dreams of a writer's blocked writer (which are shockingly similar to those of a confused 20-year-old), she says,

“I go back to trying to breathe, slowly and calmly, and I finally notice the one-inch picture frame that I put on my desk to remind me of short assignments... it reminds me that all I have to do is to write down as much as I can see through the one-inch picture frame. This is all I have to bite off for the time being... I also remember a story that I know I've told elsewhere but that over and over helps me to get a grip: thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at that time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he'd had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

On the kitchen table of my mind I am surrounded by birds - unfinished stories, half-formed dreams, unexplored ideas, and shadowed visions of the future – and I am “immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead.” I am gazing at the tapestry of my life, so large that in my close proximity I cannot see the whole of it. Yet, despite it's epic proportions I somehow how, depressingly, still manage to spot the sections left to complete, the frayed ends of untwisted threads and it seems impossible to conquer. Overwhelmed, waves of panic and confusion roll over me, my mind goes into over-drive listing all the things yet to do, organizing them by importance, then reorganizing them by priority, then becoming bitterly disappointed with the realization that I do not in fact have a hundred hands to juggle this all. But, somehow, amidst all the crowding, clamoring thoughts a small voices speaks, miraculously getting through my muddled brain,

“Bird by bird... Through a one-inch picture frame,” it says.

“Impossible,” I retort.” Have you seen how many birds there are?”

“Bird by bird...”

“Hmph,” goes my schizophrenic, self-arguing subconscious.

Defeated but slightly relieved, I begin to breath. Calming down, I peak through my fingers, fingers that are bravely, though misguidedly, trying to separate me from reality. Gazing through the slits, I see once more my life-tapestry, huge and beautiful in its divinely ordered confusion. Standing right up close, my nose brushing the rough fabric, I resolve to look through my one-inch picture frame. I un-crick my neck from it's upward-gazing position and shift my focus to what is placed in front of me, a small, pretty pattern in need of completion. Slowly, reluctantly, I pick up the ends of the thread and begin to knot them together, hoping that somehow what I'm doing will make something of beauty and all the while reigning in my panicking upward- and outward-gazing mind. As I weave I remind myself that one small knot in my tapestry is one small part of the whole, and that in its mundane simplicity it is a thing of beauty and purpose. Over and over again I remind myself that for me to live is to take life one bird at a time, one line of life written with care and beauty in the smallest details, one thoughtfully constructed stanza of the poem that is my heart's journey.

Slowly I work and slowly, one inch at a time I push my rock over the mountain, realizing all the while that life isn't about reaching the top but finding beauty in the pushing.