Why Pigeon?
To put it simply, I just love pigeons.
Everything about them is just so weirdly endearing to me. It’s their general pudginess. It’s the way they coo. It’s the fact that it’s so rare to find a bird so incredibly lacking in self-preservation but so abundant in confidence. You guys may not agree but I’ve seen pigeons fight Death for a stale crumb.
Beyond the aesthetic sense, pigeons also represent the mundane to me. Or rather, my love of the mundane. Reading through the different Bear Blogs is so cool because I get to see snapshots of countries outside of my own. And I’m not sure what the bird distribution is like in your country/town/city but here we are practically swarming with these things. In hawker centres, high-rise buildings, on occasion somebody’s house, and practically anywhere they can squeeze their fat, feathery bodies into. And so it comes as no surprise that where life is, there are pigeons.
My life is hardly exciting—by circumstance and by choice. I was raised in a nuclear middle-class family, I rode the conventional education pathway to university and I have no clue where I’m headed from here. On the other hand, I have friends who live a life of passion. They took the road less travelled, fought hell and high water to study what they wanted to study and are genuinely on fire for the things they love in such an admirable way. They’re outstanding in their own fields and they don’t shy away from the spotlight. Compared to pigeons, they’re eagles, birds of paradise, macaws. They soar, they’re bold, they’re bright.
Well, pigeons are no less birds than they are.
I don’t think pursuing a mundane life is any less or more admirable than pursuing a life of passion. For me, the mundane comes with a sense of contentment and comfort in familiarity. I want a life where I’ll always know the laundry will be in the basket again tomorrow and that there will be dishes for washing. I don’t need to win all the awards or be the best in everything like my friends as long as my life remains stable.
On that note, a series of rough patches regarding my grades last year forced me to evaluate this philosophy. How sustainable was this philosophy? It suddenly seemed like an idealistic sort of life where all I had to do was the same things over and over to ignore the uncertainty of the things ahead by deluding myself into a sense of normalcy. How would it stand up to life’s curveballs?
By some sheer coincidence, I got my answers in pigeon form.
There used to be a pigeon couple living two floors below mine on the ledge of an air-conditioning unit. They built their nest in the little gutter running along the ledge and sat there every single day (I knew because checking on them was part of my routine). From time to time, the neighbours would shoo them away because, well, pigeons poop. And without fail, they would return the next day with their new collections of sticks.
After a while, I was resigned to watching them rebuild everything again and again with some pity. Then I noticed something—they weren’t just blindly rebuilding, they were learning. They knew when to leave when the neighbours were in the house and where it was difficult to reach to shoo them off. Their persistence eventually beat out whatever patience the neighbours had and they raised two little squabs.
It kind of dawned upon me late after they up and left with their grown birds a few months ago. The real challenge in maintaining a mundane life won’t be the curveballs, but rather the inability to adapt to new circumstances.
I like to think of it as a thermal equilibrium sort of thing. No matter how much I heat or cool something, if I leave it back out at room temperature, it will eventually go back to room temperature. Sometimes I’ll still have to adjust the room temperature to make the difference in temperatures smaller but my object will always match it. Likewise, routines may change but with persistence and determination, they always just become a new normal.
In that vein, I hope writing these ramblings will also become a sort of new normal too. Meanwhile, I’m content living my mundane life. I’ll wake up, wash the laundry, buy lunch and walk through my pigeon-populated neighbourhood, knowing that there are pigeons today and there will be pigeons tomorrow.