How a Duck Reminded Me of How Well I’m Made
In the final session of the day with a group of 14 businesspeople yesterday, I asked them to ponder 2 questions:
1) What question about you, your life and your work would you love to resolve?
2) What is it within human beings that makes that question dissolve?
And they meandered off, into the bright October sunshine on the banks of the river Thames to wonder and wander.
I did the same for myself.
With nods and smiles to each other as we ambled through the gorgeous gardens of Henley Business School, I noticed far more calm, far more curiosity, and far more relaxed demeanours of the people I’d met for the first time 7 hours earlier.
We had spent the day looking at the source of our wellbeing, the source of our best ideas, the source of the feeling that we’d all been looking for.
And as thoughts of ‘doing’ and ‘achieving’ developed more into realisations of ‘being’, we each saw more truth about who we really are. The ‘What I am before I think of myself’ question. The ‘What’s wrong with me if I get gripped by anxiety/insecurity/fear/pressure question. The ‘Am I enough, just as I am’ question.
I was touched by each person’s openness and sharing, and how wise they were, often without realising. My co-host shared his own seeing with clarity and beauty. I shared my own inner turmoils and battles with depression, and ‘not feeling good enough’ and what I had seen about the human condition that transformed my relationship with me and my life.
We had sat in quiet. We had sat in intellectual rabbit holes. We had sat as human beings.
I noticed ducks on the river. Waterproof. The natural oil that’s secreted from the duck’s body onto their feathers that makes the phrase ‘like water off a duck’s back’ 100% accurate. And the duck doesn’t produce that oil by willpower. In its nature, its birthright is its ability to transform the nutrients from its food into oils that make its feathers waterproof. What’s visible to us in looking at ducks is often invisible to us in considering ourselves.
Seeing the truth of what can look invisible has changed my life, and that of countless others I’ve had the honour to work with over the past 10 years.
As each of us walked back into the building, I felt grateful and was looking forward to hearing from each other’s what they’d been thinking about and where their thinking had ended up.
Some had noticed that the question they wanted to resolve just didn’t seem serious anymore, and even amusing now. Some had noticed their question still weighed a little heavy on them. Some had forgotten what the questions I asked were, and still had a lovely 30 minutes by the river.
One of them had the question “Can I get life wrong” and already had figured it out that he couldn’t. The only one whose judgement mattered to him was his own. And that he could let that go as easily as he could make it matter. His shoulders lowered. A somewhat shy smile crossed his face. My own eyes welled up. The room was quiet yet buzzing with the energy of 15 people.
Each of us left having seen a little more about how well we are made. The invisible oil in our own feathers. And went our separate ways with more understanding, self-compassion, and appreciation of the spirit within us that makes the physical, practical world far more navigable, and less worthy of worry.
