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take time to smell the ducklings...or something like that


The other day I was walking downtown, I was in a hurry. While crossing the little bridge over the stream, I saw a family of ducks swimming around. A young mom and her two little kids were walking by, they looked to be in a hurry, they didn't look particularly happy but I took a chance and said, hey! did you see the ducks swimming in the stream? And they said, huh? And I pointed at the swimmy ducks and the mom and kids said, "Awww....how CUTE!!" and the little kids laughed and the mom thanked me and it was sweet and I'm glad I took a chance; I could have been mistaken for a weirdo but wasn't and ducks! Yeah.

Today I was in a hurry again, I seem to be in a hurry always, and yet I took a moment to stand on the bridge and look at the ducks. The babies are getting bigger and soon they'll move out, go to college, get jobs, and tattoos and beak grommets or whatever, and so I'm glad I took a moment out of my crazy day to look and see the ducks while they're still youngsters. 

I realize I often don't take time to stop and see what's going on around me. I will be lost in my own head for days at a time. I think I'm seeing the people around me, but a lull in action brings me up short, I'll find myself staring at one of my kids and they'll appear so different, as though they matured overnight, I'll think, when the hell did they get so grown up? Then I realize I've been looking at them but not seeing them and some significant amount of time has passed. Where the hell was I? 

This is human nature, and so I'm stifling the urge to wind this whole thing up neatly by saying something like, "Take time to really see the world, because things change so gosh darn fast, ducks, kids, grow up, you're missing it all blah blah blah blah." But I will refrain, because damn it, if we kept ourselves continually open to the wonder of it all all the fucking time, we'd go insane. Maybe then the real lesson is to be aware that we need to tune out sometimes, it's okay as long as we consciously check back for a few minutes in on a regular basis, and from time to time we can risk pointing out the ducklings to other people and hope that a nice passerby might do the same for us.





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