April 2025
“Everybody is a genius but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid”
– Albert Einstein
“No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings. How can the bird that is born for flight sit in a cage and sing?”
– William Blake
A fish and a bird may indeed fall in love, but then where shall they live? That’s a question Elizabeth Gilbert asks in her recent book. Here’s a comparison I like about birds and fish and by analogy different types of people. A fish and a bird can be friends and be together. But they can’t spend their lives together solely in either the water or in the air. They have to take turns being uncomfortable to make the other happy.
Birds are meant to fly. They feel at home in the sky with their wings spread wide. But a bird cannot always be flying, they get tired and need to land to rest. Usually back home in its nest which they always come back to. Birds can hold their breath and spend time underwater. But I’m sure if you asked a bird, it would say it prefers to be flying.
Fish are meant to swim. They feel at home underwater where they can swim anywhere. A fish can swim forever and when they get tired, they only need to slow their movement for a while. They have homes in the water that they swim back to. Fish can hold their breath for a while and come out of the water. But I’m sure if you asked a fish, it would say it prefers to be swimming.
The bird can look down and marvel at how the fish swims, so deft and deep, and cheer the fish on from its lofty perch. How many friends the fish has and what a vibrant school and community. And the fish can look up in awe of the bird’s flight and watch it soar all alone up there, imagining what it feels like to weave between the clouds and tear through the sky.
They can admire each other and they can help keep each other safe. The bird can alert the fish when bad weather is coming so it can ride out storms, deep below the turbulent waves. And the fish can locate teeming schools of krill for the bird when its hungry and tired of hunting. They can support each other and be good for one another.
But they can’t be together in the same way as they are when they’re alone or with others like them. If they tried, one or the other would drown. But what happens sometimes is a fish and a bird meet and spend their time trying to change the nature of the other instead of accepting them as they are. When a fish likes a bird, they sometimes try so hard to live life as a bird. They put on feathers, hoping it would be enough to change them. But it doesn’t.
But the bird should have known the fish wasn’t a bird when it spent so much time underwater. It would catch glimpses of the scales and watch them struggle to breathe in the open air, but the bird wants to believe someday they’d fly away together so it creates justifications for the obvious. Sometimes the opposite happens where the bird tries to change and be a fish.
The bird follows its lead and dips below the waters surface and try to get close but then take in a lungful of water and immediately surface coughing and spluttering. The fish knows then that the bird isn’t a fish even if they didn’t want to believe it was true. Because deep down we like what’s familiar. We like our comfort zones and we don’t like breathing in atmospheres that are alien to us.
They can pretend all they want but instead of pretending if the fish took off its feathers and finally admitted to the bird that it was a fish. It could strip off those fake feathers and be the most beautiful fish you’d ever seen. Then they could see each other for what they are instead of what they want each other to be. They’d be happy within themselves that finally they were done trying to be something they are not.
The fish thinks about the world as someone who spends their time underwater swimming. The bird thinks about the world as someone who spends their time in the sky flying. Clouds are normal to the bird but might be scary to the fish. While for the bird the idea that everything is wet feels foreign and completely unnatural.
This could be a scary moment. The bird might think; “Maybe I can be okay spending my life with this beautiful fish without ever really understanding their world. Maybe I can grow some scales of my own and learn to hold my breath for longer and longer periods of time and maybe I can learn to live underwater.” Or the fish might think, “if I flap my flippers hard enough, really how hard can it be to fly?”
But no, it won’t work. The bird can’t grow gills. The fish can’t spring feathers. And they both have to accept things the way they are, not the way they wish they could be. And they have to learn to accept and appreciate one another for the way they are and the worlds they’re from and how they feel about and view each other and the worlds from those different perspectives.
The bird feels most at ease in the sky and the fish is most comfortable in the water and no amount of effort or work is going to change that for either of them. The bird should try to be the best bird it can be and the fish should try to be the best fish it can be and learn the lessons and values from each others world. They can be together but they cannot be the same.