Have You Seen Other Duck?
Sometimes I want to run.
Not for fitness. I want to run away.
That feeling almost always means one thing: I am very tired. Not sleepy-tired. Tired underneath. The kind where I have no energy to rise to any occasion. Ordinary day-to-day stressors feel insurmountable. Stupid things I said yesterday ago come back sharper than when I said them. Character flaws I've known about myself forever suddenly seem unbearable, permanent, disqualifying.
That was the weather I was already in yesterday, when we lost a duck.
Every morning I open the pen and let our runner ducks go down to the lake. They spend the whole day out there, free, in the sunshine, doing whatever it is runner ducks do all day. Around four o'clock, my son and I get on the paddleboard and go round them up.
Yesterday they weren't where they should have been.
We paddled the shoreline. Nothing. I was already turning back. Already giving up. Already running the math on what I'd tell him, when three of them came out of a wooded area, sheepish.
I have never once seen the four of them separated. They move like one animal.
We paddled behind them the whole way home. No sass. Not a sound out of them. Just three sets of feet going straight back to the house and into the pen, like they knew. Blaise counted them from the front of the board.
One. Two. Three.
When we got to shore, he turned to the girls and asked, "Have you guys seen other duck?"
He's two and a half. He asked them. Not me.
I stayed silent and hung my head.
And then the whole thing came loose in me, the way it does when you're already running on empty.
Do I even want to live here? I try to garden, but I'm too busy. I want to keep ducks, but I'm on the road all the time. I want to build a food forest, and we're so far out in the middle of nowhere that I can't wrap my head around running my dream business and building my dream forest in the same lifetime. My life contradicts itself. So… the coast, then? Where it's much harder to farm, and the hurricanes are getting stronger, and the sea is coming up. Or stay here, next to the power plants, next to the brain-eating amoebas in the warm water, next to the small-town bureaucracy, waiting to find out whose land gets taken and what for. If it isn't mother nature coming for us with a flood, it's somebody else with a clipboard. And then I open the news and there's a flood across the world and a girl being pulled out of the rubble, and I'm crying in my kitchen for a child I've never met and for every parent over there still turning over stones looking for a baby. And I'm sitting here in my own house trying to build one small bubble of safety for one small boy, and everything, everything is out to get us. Sneaky as an eagle picking off my ducks, one at a time, while I'm not looking.
I don't argue with a spiral like that anymore. I observe.
The spiral is not me finally seeing clearly. That is a tired nervous system running a threat inventory, and a tired nervous system will always, always come back with the same answer: everywhere, and soon. Hurricanes, amoebas, eminent domain, societal collapse, dead children on the other side of the world. Every fear I own, lined up and marched past me in a single breath… and not one of them arrived because I'd learned something new about the world that afternoon.
They arrived because I was exhausted and I felt like I had just failed to protect something small that trusted me.
The fears aren't fake. The hurricanes really are getting stronger. The amoeba is real. Eagles, also real; I have three ducks instead of four today. Everything on that list can happen. Some of it will.
What's false is the volume. What's false is the feeling that it's all bearing down on my particular house, this particular week, and that the correct response is to sell everything and run.
And the tell, every single time, is certainty. The spiral never arrives as a question. It arrives as a verdict: already decided, already obvious, faintly impatient with me for not having seen it sooner. It doesn't want me to go look at anything. It wants me to act, immediately, on what it has already concluded.
Nothing that has ever actually helped me showed up like that.
My favorite poem is Desiderata, by Max Ehrmann. I have carried it around for most of my adult life. I had also been always quoting half a sentence and cutting off the part that mattered.
The line I always quoted was the one about not distressing yourself with dark imaginings. Good line. But I never held onto what comes immediately after it:
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Written in 1927. And here it was in my life on a Monday afternoon.
Not fears are foolish. Not fears are false. Born of fatigue. They have a birthplace, and the birthplace is usually not the world. It's the body.
I have spent years learning to notice this in other people. It's most of my actual job. When an athlete tells me they've lost it, that they're finished, that they should never have started, I don't debate the case. I ask how their calorie intake and quality has been and how they’ve been sleeping. Nine times out of ten, the existential crisis resolves into a nap and a meal, and they're embarrassed, and I tell them not to be, because it happens to all of us.
Apparently I still needed a duck to remind me this about myself.
If you want a rose, you have to respect the thorns.
You don't want the thorns. You'd genetically engineer them right off if you could. But you can't have the bloom without them, so you learn to work around them: you slow down, you pay attention, you get better with your hands. And you accept that no matter how skilled and careful you are, you will still sometimes get pricked.
That's not resignation. That's training.
It's the difference between this could hurt me and I am becoming someone who handles this well. One of those is a life spent scanning the horizon. The other is a practice. Secure your own mask before assisting others. But also, actually learn where the mask is. Actually get strong. Actually build the skill, in the hours you have, on the ground you're standing on.
Fear is non-negotiable. Bad things are non-negotiable.
Skill is the negotiable part. Skill is the entire negotiable part.
He is going to ask again.
Probably tomorrow, probably at the shore, probably while he's counting. And so far I have given him almost nothing.
I'm not going to tell him she's fine. I'm also not going to tell him she's gone. I didn't see it happen. I have a guess. My guess is the likely one. A likely guess is not a fact, and I am not willing to hand my son a fact I don't have.
Not about a duck. Not about anything.
So I say the only true thing I have: Let's go look for her again tomorrow.
And then, in the morning, I open the pen.
Same as every morning. Knowing exactly what's out there. Knowing the eagle is still around, that the woods are still the woods, and that I cannot follow them down to the lake and stand over them all day. And that if I could, they wouldn't be runner ducks anymore. They'd just be something I own.
They sprint down to the water quacking happily in the sunshine.
It isn't a bubble of safety. It's better than a bubble.
It's a life you let out in the morning, and go looking for at four.
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