A friend from Wisconsin told me a story about a flock of Canadian Geese that were coming in for a landing in February outside her window at the river below.
She stopped to watch as they put out their feet to land in the water, only to find that what they were landing on was ice. They tumbled and slid as they hit the ice, flapped wings, banging into one another, and set up a thunderous honking noise as they struggled to come to a stop. She said it was the funniest thing she’d ever seen, and I laughed, too. The mental imagery was comical.
It got me thinking about how important it is to know what we’re jumping into. As the geese prepared for water, the approach was far different than it would have been had they known they were going to land on something solid. You can visualize that in your own mind. One approach has you ready to jump into something fluid, thereby maintaining speed and pushing yourself forward. The other has you gently lowering yourself so that your feet touch lightly upon the ground. Each approach is appropriate for the respective landing site. But when we use the wrong approach, the results can be painful. The geese demonstrated a basic law of physics, and it was funny.
How many times can we look to our own lives where we have mistakenly come in for a landing without full knowledge of what we were jumping into, only to fall on our faces, or do our best to maintain dignity in the face of a mistaken approach?
Like the geese, we might be tempted to honk loudly, but as humans we have the capacity to learn from our mistakes and not repeat them. That’s the beauty of the journey. We get so many opportunities to do things again and again to refine our understanding of what is needed, and if we’re fortunate enough to learn from our mistaken approaches, we can calibrate our response so that we choose the landing pattern for each situation that will be just right.