Out of the nest

It seems everywhere my family and I have gone over the past few weeks we have seen a baby bird on the ground. Now I assume that the majority of these little guys were blown out of their nests. However, I wonder if there were not a few who were gently kicked out of their nest.

For a bird, I assume, a nest is a comfortable place. It is where family is. It is where food is brought to them. It is a place where they have everything they need, at least for the first part of their life… But there comes a time when they must leave the nest, they must learn to fly; they must begin learning new lessons outside the nest that will help prepare them to have their own little bird family in the future.

Two weeks ago I had my first phone meeting with a coach that I have been assigned. This is not a coach that will get my body in shape, though I probably need one of those. This is a coach to help push me out of my comfort zones. To help me wade through the stuff I deal with. He is there to help me begin asking the right questions, and point me to resources to help move in the right direction. Most of the things my coach and I have discussed are things I have wanted to do, I have been planning to do. But when there is another person asking about how this or that is going, or how such and such is coming along, there is a bit more urgency to make progress, to show some movement in these areas…

Many of us need that urgency in our lives to begin. When I was around 5 my Mom babysat 2 kids. They had a pool at their house. I stayed in the shallow end of the pool, mainly because I became pretty nervous around that deeper end. One day the older boy (he was about 5 years older than I was) threw me into the deep end. I did not have time to think about how I really did not know how to swim, or what the proper swim stroke might be to get myself out of this jam (even if I had known any)… The only thought in my head was, get your head above the water. Once that was accomplished, the next objective was to keep it above the water. There was an urgency to get those things done. Once those first two objectives were met, things weren’t so bad. The scary end of the pool was not so scary any more.

Sometimes we find ourselves out of our comfort zone. We may have been blown out of our comfort zone where we have to learn to live where we find ourselves. We may be gently, or not so gently, kicked out of our nest to begin learning new lessons for life. We may have someone come along side us to help us to begin asking the right questions, moving in the right direction and encouraging us to take the next step to move forward. Or we may just have some bigger kid think it’s time for us to sink or swim… Sometimes we can resist being taken out of our comfort zone, other times we don’t have a choice. Either way, we need to learn what we can today so that we can continue to move forward tomorrow.