Not noticing, even the good stuff

What do we miss because of our expectations don’t match up?

I wish I had noticed the life in front of me sooner.

Baby birds are inches from my face. A few exhilarating inches.

It's like being in a zoo but without the captivity. Plus I'm kneeling and crouching on our deck, butt in the air, peering through a sliver of space between gray deck boards. Definitely not a body position for the zoo.

The babies are a delight yet a half-sad surprise because I hadn't noticed them until just then.

I wish I had noticed sooner.

Months earlier in the spring, a robin started frequenting the backyard. Then it built a nest under the second-story deck, occupied the nest, and then tended to babies until one day they all left.

I observed the early-spring progression with fixed attention. Reverence. Marvel. I think I even experienced joy, some sort of rejoicing at the wonder that life exists at all and I was able to witness it. That last fact was a marvel too—I used to not experience life that way, like at all.

Now it's mid-summer, and I missed a repeat opportunity at reverence and marvel and joy entirely. How could I not have noticed?

Oh wait, I did kind of notice.

A few weeks before the second round of babies arrived, I did start regularly seeing a robin in the yard. Robins in the yard are not unusual though, so I didn't think much of it. A few weeks later I heard a bird squawking—not chirping but hollering—at me when I was outside. What's that bird's problem? I didn't even look up to see what kind of bird it was. Still weeks later, when I was kneeling in the grass picking raspberries, I heard a bird swoop overhead toward the old robin's nest under the deck. Weird bird. Why was it hanging around that old nest? I didn't look up then either.

After about the third day picking raspberries with a bird darting overhead, I resigned to get off my knees, stand upright, and glance up toward the nest. Absolute minimal effort. There was no bird hanging around the old nest by the time I looked. Again, that was one weird bird.

A day later, a bird flew in again, and after picking raspberries I decided to get serious. Up the deck stairs I clomped and found the spot directly above the nest. Down went my knees and up went my butt.

And there they were through the space between deck boards, inches from my one eyeball. One baby-bird-mouth hinged wide open like an infinite yawn. The other baby-bird-mouth remained closed in the background. And one adult-human-mouth wide open.

For weeks I had been half noticing with disregard, observing and casting the details aside because they contradicted my expectations and assumptions.

Birds only lay eggs in new nests. This turned out to be not true.

Bird-birthing was finished for the season. Also not true.

And so, I missed out on feeling reverence and marvel and joy surrounding the wonderous sequence of bird activity that leads to bird births. Sadly, living for years in despair is similar. When my whole experience of life was despair, naturally I couldn’t comprehend another possibility. But possibilities do exist, even when they do not make sense.