Wishful Thinking

I’m washing windows. It started when I had several replaced last week. The new glass made the old glass look dingy. So, I mixed up a batch of homemade window cleaner, pulled out the old microfiber rag, and got after it. I’m doing them in discrete batches, one or two at a time, makes the job less overwhelming. It started with the three windows that look out onto the pasture from the living room. Yesterday, I did the two in the utility room. In the later case, I even took down the curtains and washed them.

When I finished the living room windows and stood there admiring their sparkly beauty it occurred to me that sooner rather than later a bird would fly into them. And sure enough, later that morning there was the familiar bonk on the window. This time it was a glancing blow, but I’ve come out to find the little winged invertebrate quite dazed and confused, sitting on the porch, blinking its eyes in wonderment. It happens because there is a perfect reflection of the pasture in the newly cleaned window and the poor bird thinks it’s a place to go until it meets the reality of glass and steel.

And how many times has that happened to all of us? We look up to see what we want to see or hope to see and go running pell-mell into a figurative window or a wall. Yeah, I’ve been there. It hurts. Sometimes it’s a relationship, sometimes a business deal, sometimes it’s what you thought was a shallow spot in the river. Luckily, we don’t have cats hanging around waiting to make a meal of us and the damage is mostly mental rather than physical. But that doesn’t make it less painful, it simply increases the odds of recovery. And with any luck, we learn something from the experience, with any luck.