We Control Only So Much—We Have to Be Able to Wing It Too

It’s natural to gravitate toward the things we can control in life. But we still have to be nimble enough to freelance when situations call for it.

We were at the Tamarac National Wildlife Refuge near my hometown of Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. I was with my son Theo’s class (he was a fourth-grader at the time), and we were discovering on this leg of the field trip how millions of birds die each year in the face of obvious and less than obvious mortal threats.

The kids were paying attention well enough on this perfect spring morning. But talk—as the instructor, a retired teacher named Dave, knew from decades of experience—only goes so far.

Especially with squirrely 9- and 10-year-olds out in the sunshine after a long winter, sitting crisscross-applesauce in a clearing surrounded by pine trees, birdsong, and … well, each other.

Movement, action, involvement: These are the strategies that make lessons stick when you’re out in the sticks with a bunch of wild animals.

So Dave had the kids line up for an elaborate, eye-opening game.

“You’re Dead”

They would be birds migrating from Florida back to Minnesota.

Their task: To survive a series of potential death traps through a combination of their own efforts and fate.

At station one, Theo’s teacher and her assistant held a jump rope representing a power line, moving it back and forth and up and down while each student tried to get past.

“If you touch the rope, you’re dead,” Dave deadpanned, reminding the kids that they had an unfair advantage over real birds—for they were “flying” in broad daylight, not at night when the power lines are hidden hazards.

The kids who made it past the “power line” then faced one of their classmates wearing a cat puppet on his hand. They had to dart past the “cat,” grab a colored plastic egg (pink, yellow, orange, blue, or green), and then evade the “cat” once again without getting caught.

“If the cat touches you, you’re dead,” Dave dutifully noted.

The kids who survived then lined up before three of their classmates who were representing buildings. Each “building”-child had two cards, one in each hand.

“If you pick the card that says ‘window closed,’ that means you just ran into a window while you were flying. You’re dead,” Dave said.

The handful of kids who got through this final challenge could then go and pick up one of three colored poker chips (blue, red, or white) representing food. Perhaps they were in the clear thanks to their superior skills and intellect.

Not so fast.

Dave then revealed that some of the survivors were actually dead already; they had picked the wrong-colored egg while dodging the cat—meaning that a cowbird had chosen to lay her eggs in their nest while they were still embryos growing inside their own mothers’ eggs.

The cowbird’s eggs had hatched first, and the young cowbird thugs had pushed the unlucky kid-birds out of the nest once they’d been born.

Still, a few of the kids remained alive in the game.

But if they had chosen the wrong-colored chip as their food, they had unknowingly 
selected a meal laced with pesticides.

Dave’s response (say it with me, you know the words):

“You’re dead.”

The kids played the game five or six times, and only a handful survived each round. Those who did cheered for themselves, as kids are prone to do.

But pure chance had played a significant role in giving them the gift of living on.

We Can’t—and Don’t—Control It All

I’m confident I won’t be eaten today.

I likely won’t be electrocuted, crushed, poisoned, or bumped off either.

But I’ll face other threats and struggles, seen and unseen.

So will you.

So will we all.

Life is an unending cycle of being proactive to circumstance yet reactive to happenstance. Of advancing and adapting at the same time. We have to be able to do both, not only to survive but to thrive.

We control what we’re capable of controlling. That’s as it should be.

But as Theo and his classmates now vividly understand, thinking we can control it all is for the birds.