Eating Crow

My daughter recently went camping with her friends and they all heard a strange noise in the woods. One resourceful companion offered to try an app on his phone that identifies bird sounds to see whether the mystery could be solved. The app said – crow. All of the campers knew what a crow sounded like, so they quickly dismissed the app and decided that in addition to these strange clicks and buzzes it probably picked up a distant crow noise. 

Bothered by the unidentified noise and probably haunted by a few too many Finding Big Foot viewings, my daughter worked hard to figure out the noise.  She had the recording, she had YouTube and she had a need to know.  Finally, she solved the mystery, finding a You Tube video that had the exact same sounds that she and friends hear on that fateful day on Lake Simcoe. It was a crow. 

This answer, of course, makes me laugh and think about how often we do this. Something clearly tells us that the situation is one way, or that the solution is a clear path, or that you are not as valued in this friendship as you want to be. A million buzzes and clicks seem to confirm the answer as clear and accurate, but we dismiss it. For a million reasons we keep on working away on a solution we like better, we work away in a manner that is comfortable, with comfortable partners.  In well worn patterns and we just keep on unconsciously choosing to not see or not agree with the answer, telling ourselves that this is not a crow. 

I love this story because the group had even produced a plausible explanation, that the crow was somewhere, but not making the main noise that they wanted to identify.  As when we are faced with a clear learning about our work or relationships and we say to ourselves, yes that could work for someone else, but I have these special circumstances. It’s a difficult thing to just lean into an unwanted solution or answer and go with it, we are probably hard wired to question and keep to our patterns. But sometimes the answer is in fact the clear one in front of us, sometimes it is a crow. 

Crow on a Willow Branch by Los Angeles County Museum of Art is licensed under CC-CC0 1.0