Mockingbird

The alarm clock rang at 6am from yesterday's schedule but today is a holiday. Originally it was intended to simply be a day off, but then it became a holiday.

Three hours later I woke up on my own accord and peered out at my window. Despite not being open I could a Northern Mockingbird outside doing his thing. Then he stopped doing his thing and instead he decided to talk to me, perched just outside my window he began with her song of mockery:

"What are you doing with your life?" he asked.
It's my day off.

"And why do you need a day off? What's so troublesome?"
It's been a tough winter

"You humans, you think you had a tough winter? Do you have any idea where I've been to, just to land right back here? I suppose that's what you're in your bed pondering."
More or less

"Humans. You especially, you're so dreadfully human. Do you know how much of a waste of potential most of you are? You have it so easy that you make it hard."
What do you mean?

"Listen, I don't have much time. This is all you need to know: In my lifetime, I have seen many different lands, I ate and drank as I pleased, fine dining that you all have cast aside or fast food from the drive through when I'm in a rush. I've built more than one home for myself and in fact I'm late to make another. Today I made love to my woman and she will bear my child. We share only songs of joy and necessity. We live according to our means because we innately know that to carry excess only holds us back. The sum of your desires today, love, mediation and success are my daily story. You are so dreadfully human, terribly mammal. You have a brain far more complex than mine but your mind is insufferably simple. You would use all of your advance means of communicating only to complain, only to add weight to the problems you should have lifted yourself from by your hands. What I would do with your hands, let alone your brain. Listen I have to go, you know the rest, or you will."
Wait, what would you do with my means?

No, it couldn't be. My job, my love, my career, my every waking hour, has been devoted to the utterly beastly. I wake up and serve only myself, as the bear in the woods and the hog in his sty. Could it be that this song of mockery was not meant for me in a divine sense but rather a simple reminder from species to species? A reminder that in all of our advancement, we still live to die, and what we achieve is no more noble than our skybound counterparts? Even still, we wish only to follow them and learn to fly. When I asked him what he would do with my means, he paused a bit before flying off. I'm not sure if he had never really bothered to think that far ahead, or whether in his silence he told me something that I just could not understand.

I got up, made breakfast, bewildered. Somehow I instinctively decided to crack open my new copy of Primer - finally I'll be able to see it in its entirety. The movie passed. Just as it were the first time I watched it I didn't blink for an hour and a half. It hit me harder today than any other time I've watched it - that we are so bound by our conception of time and we forge our own shackles. What a bird does everyday, we stretch out over years. What we could achieve in one day, a bird could spend his entire year never doing. All you have to do is begin to allow your very complicated brain to let go of its conception of time, let go of what has happened and what will. All you have to remember is that yesterday was neither a waste nor a gain, because it did not cause today. Today caused yesterday just as much as it may cause tomorrow. When you begin to understand this, you will know how to write your own story.