American Coots : The Bird in Hand

These are American Coots. I can’t hear their name without immediately asking whether or not they’re old…. We laugh about the “old coot.” Here, the ones leading are entirely serene, while the ones behind are squawking and flapping. The old leading the young? In my mind I always envision “that table” at the coffee shop where the old men gather each morning to swap lies and explain how they’d fix the world. As I sat on the shore of a Texas lake watching these birds, I started thinking about old. Real old. Looking down I saw seashells. Millions of years ago this entire area was underwater, part of the Gulf of Mexico. There’s old, and then there’s OLD.

Our siddur includes a margin note to which my eye is drawn each week. It is a teaching that says that aging should be thought of as gaining time rather than losing it. In other words, we should focus less on our modern conception that the life in front of us is diminishing and instead focus more on the treasures - the real treasures - that we have accumulated through our decades of experience. It is a fundamental inversion of perspective, but like so much in our tradition, it is simultaneously simple and profound. The phrase is, “a wealth of experience.” To mix metaphors, we are being reminded to give pride of place to the bird in hand.

Perhaps my oh-so-insightful appreciation of this perspective is a function of my ever-increasing wisdom. Or - laughingly - perhaps it’s just entirely self-serving, grasping for the benefit of getting older…. Wealth isn’t what we spend; wealth is what we have, the product of our investments. Our siddur, then, is reminding us to move away from “spending time,” and instead to think of “investing time.” Today’s seashells will also be limestone bedrock millions of years from now. And we today flapping and squawking, will one day be serene old Coots calmly leading our flock.