Hello, humans of this chaotically beautiful world!
I guess the title says it all, but what good is writing without personal interpretation of the said thing? I just read this, "I wonder how a bird, whose wings were cut off, looks at the sky?" on an Instagram post, and felt truly intrigued. Kudos to the one who made it sound this poetic and beautiful, sad though.
So let the questions take over.
Does it still look at it with the same curiosity? Does it remember what it felt like to fly? Or has it just accepted its fate? And maybe the most painful question is: does it still dream of flying again?
In its simplest form, you have taken the only purpose of its life. The ultimate freedom.
What's with it?
Being honest, I always find it strange when I have to use "it" for another living creature. I mean just because they are not human; we just label them as it. And if I recall, I have talked about this thing before as well. Best escape is to just say it is a grammatical way. And funny thing is, we do this with humans, too. Just bit differently, we have a big vocabulary for such labelling: the coward, the failure, the introvert etc. At surface, we rarely bother to ask what happened before we arrive at our conclusions. Maybe labels are convenient because understanding someone requires effort, while labelling them requires only a few seconds. Although, me saying someone clears the intention behind. Because the closed one are never someone.
Anyways coming back to our bird, I wonder if we would look at this it differently, only if it could speak. Would we be more sympathetic if it told us how much it hurts? How much it missed flying? Would we feel sorry for it? But hey, we also do the same thing with humans. Such mysterious and strange creatures, we human are.
Maybe the problem is not that we lack the ability to understand suffering, but that we have made some understanding with conditions i.e. conditional understanding. We usually want explanations, evidence, and sometimes, visible damage before accepting that someone is actually hurt. A person who cries is considered sad, while the one who remains silent is often assumed to be fine - maybe a philosopher. The pain is same, just explained differently, and receives different treatment. So does a bird need to explain its pain for us to recognise what it has lost? We already know what wings are for, right? Yet, when it comes to human, who can explain things, we assume things. Assumptions, such a marvellous word to summarise everything.
Limitations!
But let me be rational for a moment. Just because I understand someone's circumstances does not mean justifying everything they do. There is a difference between explaining a behavior and excusing it. Same way, acknowledging someone's limitations does not mean denying their ability to grow
The same goes for freedom. It simply does not mean the absence of restrictions. Because a caged bird, even with wings, may fail to fly. A human may have every legal right to pursue a dream and still lack the resources or opportunities to make it possible. Technically, at the surface, the door is wide open. Practically, the distance between standing at the cage door - the start line, and the other side can be enormous. Because it is easy to tell everyone that try harder while ignoring their circumstances is hardly a reasonable solution.
"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." - Rousseau.
Maybe the cruelest cage is the one that convinces its prisoner that the open sky was never real, never for them.
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Peace 🕊️
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