Have you ever seen a The Simpsons character from the front? (That is for those who know the series and watched it.) Do yourself a favor and google it. It is quite horrifying. In any case, have you ever seen a goose from the front? It is quite funny how derpy or strange they look. Or in a less happy manner, they look kind of menacing.
But this is a post about how to take life less seriously whilst watching strange and funny portraits of the common goose. So let us rather focus on the happier and derpy rendition!
Recently, I visited an alpaca farm with my girlfriend 
Like this one above, it looks like it is asking me for food in a very menacing way.
"Where is the food, hey?"
I can already see the American-Italian gangster with the sideways hat and the stereotypical accent...
But whilst standing there, being harassed by a bunch of hungry geese, I thought about how we ruin our own lives by taking it so seriously. Recently, a family friend got diagnosed with terminal sickness and she is not doing well. But we were tasked to clean her home. And not to go too deeply into the sad story in a happy post, it was a strange experience to me how one's life is actually a bunch of papers someone will someday throw out.
Thus my question, why do we take it so seriously if, at the end of the day, someone will just come into your home when you passed away and through everything in the trash?
I am also reminded of the quote: Everyone will die but only some will have lived.
What more can we do than to live when we live?
When the geese finally calmed down, realizing that I do not have food, the reality of our situation as humans struck me between the eyes like someone threw a rock at me:
Firstly, we are obsessed with being in control of everything, and when we cease to have control we tend to feel that we are losing everything.
Secondly, we fear that we will find what we desire. In the end, we desire to control, but we do not ever desire to achieve that control. We, in some sense, desire the desire to control. When we actually achieve that level of control, we feel out of control again because there is nothing left to control.
That turned philosophical and psychological very quickly. I think the psychoanalyst Lacan held this position: we desire desire, we do not want to cease desiring. The object of our desire is never something physical, it is a constant desiring. We in fact fear two things: that we find that something we desire, and that we find out that desiring will lead to nowhere.
We thus constantly fool ourselves into deferring our desire and by covering up that we desire.
I write a lot about happiness. I think that our non-desiring desire is par excellence aimed at happiness. We desire happiness, but it is in the process or act of desiring that we acquire happiness, even though most people are not aware of that. Most people think that happiness is some point that they can achieve, that is, some destination, but it is rarely that. It is the adventure we take towards death that we actually live and find happiness.
Wait, this escalated very quickly into something I did not plan on writing. I planned to write something funny about geese and the portraits I took of them, but now it became a full-on philosophical musing post. I hope you found something useful in the tangent!
Whilst photographing the geese, I saw underneath the trees a peacock and her babies. I have never seen baby ones! They were so cute, trying to hide underneath their mom the whole time. Or I think it was their mother.
They ate some seeds, and ran back to their mother, testing the waters. We live in an area where there are various big birds of prey. Some other species of wild birds that roam our streets, like the helmeted guineafowl, are hunted by the birds of prey. Or at least their chicks.
I hope you enjoyed this post! And that you will take life a little less seriously! All of the photographs were taken with my Nikon D300 and 18-70mm lens. All of the musings are my own unless stated otherwise. Happy birding, and stay well!
