A beautiful bird

a beautiful, colorful bird

In my office, there is a painting of a beautiful, colorful bird. It lives next to the men's bathroom. I see it multiple times a day.

Art tells a story; it evokes emotion, accessing parts of the subconscious that are unreachable otherwise. In this way, I always felt that the bird was placed within my corporate office environment to inspire. When I looked at the bird it seemingly cheered me on: "Fly to your greatest heights! Gravity can't hold you down; you can achieve wherever your mind takes you!" And I grew to be quite fond of this bird.

Eventually, as I became more familiar with the office, I realized that there were multiple versions of this bird sprinkled among different floors. Sort of like various NFT collections, these birds have different colors and backgrounds but are essentially the same image.

"The more the merrier," I thought. Having art is nice to appreciate during the workday, but because the bird hangs on the wall leading up to the bathroom, stopping in the middle of the hallway to inspect its finer details would not only be strange but it would also obstruct traffic.This is a workspace, not a museum. Before the return to office policies became mandatory, though, less people occupied the office in general and at the end of the day the space was nearly almost always empty. Thus, on a random night, I found myself essentially alone with the bird and took the opportunity to appreciate it completely, without the fear of standing out to curious bystanders.

On the surface, I saw what I had always seen. A bird perched and happy. The embodiment of potential. To me, it always served as an example of what I could be, or anyone else who saw it could be, for that matter. It was only after really stopping to look at it that I noticed something peculiar. At the bottom of the photo, the bird clearly has its leg shackled to a chain, with the other end of the chain connected to a rusting pipe.

What had originally been a source of motivation has now been subverted into an image of horror. Does everyone in the office know about the chain? Am I the only one who has never noticed this detail?

Now, when I feel demotivated at work, or when I wonder if I'm wasting my life in a corporate job, I think about the bird. Currently, I am 27 years old. In all likelihood, I have "many" years left of my life, but more and more I feel the realities of impermanence. Part of my disposition is to be concerned about death and dying but I recently am thinking more about my life and how I am spending it. What really am I striving for?

For the majority of your life until just after college, most major decisions have been made for you. It is clear that you must get the best grades you are capable of in order to get into the best college that will accept you. From there, you work the best internships you can and then you get into a career path that theoretically will take you the rest of the way. Some paths are defined beyond college and the decisions that were made for you until you were 22 now extend a few years further. You can become an investment banker, work 100 hour weeks for two years, and then transition into private equity. Or, you can go to medical school and then residency. You can do consulting and then jump to business school. The paths are hard but they are defined.

In college, no matter how difficult, it always felt like I had made the right decision. Just put your head down and get through it. Now, the doubt of how time should best be spent is a constant conundrum. At a certain point, though, if you fail to choose a single path, you fail at everything. If you commit to a single path, all other paths are still failures but you give yourself the opportunity to succeed at a single path.

So, here I am, on a single path that seemed worthwhile at its trailhead. To leave this path means risking all paths failing, to never succeed at anything substantial. And this is not to say that the meaning of life is to be successful. My current definition of the meaning of life could most closely be described as observing the world for what it is and spending as much quality time with people that you love, so the fear is not about being competitive in high pace environments so much that I question if it is a game worth playing at all.

Any bird knows its real potential: to fly and sing and be free, which is why I am slightly offended by the painting in my office. It almost mockingly says: "Yes, you and everyone here are birds. Children of the universe, your souls can fly free, but we have chained you here. The chain is so subtle, though, that you would never notice. You will work here for months and months, years even, and never notice the thin chain around your ankle. You will never notice because you are distracted, so distracted that you don't notice something blatantly, obviously displayed right in front of your face. Every time you go to the bathroom you have seen the chain but you never realized it." And I wonder if company leadership or building management realize either that all the birds are chained. Perhaps the commissioned artist is the only one who knows, and they had their own motivations for creating the chains.

Ultimately, I don't know the purpose of the chains or the birds for that matter. One of my friends does not like any kind of art within corporate spaces. She believes that is inauthentic and devalues the art. For me, though, it provides a daily pause to question whether I am, in fact, a chained bird and what I should do about it.