It’s a warm Sunday morning, you wake up and brew your essential fuel, turn on the news, and get ready for the day. You walk outside and see a familiar bird on a branch of an oak tree in your front yard. This same bird makes the same repetitive (and usually annoying) chirping sound every morning and always returns to the same spot on the tree, just like how birds return to the same place after going south for winter every year, birds are creatures of habit.

In a similar way, so are we. Everyday we wake up, we have our same morning routine, we eat the same (unhealthy) food, listen to the same music, and talk about the same things. When grouping all of these daily activities it makes life seem a bit mundane.

So how do we break from this 9-5 lifestyle? Is there really much more than going to work or school and coming home to being fed information through corrupted television? We learn to say the same things we are told on biased news reports, to the point where in conversations the words we say aren’t even ours.

What happened to thinking on your own, and forming your own intelligent opinion without letting other people put words in your mouth?

That’s what birds do though, they copy the same calls of birds around them as a form of communication, they repeat what they hear and do not have individual voices either.

Why do we repeat the tainted phrases that are recited to us? Why do we keep returning back into the same place every year? Why are we being told what to think, when to think, and not to think?

Recently I’ve been wondering why my neighbors put bird seed in the street, as I always grumble in question to myself driving home impatiently waiting for the birds to fly out of the way. Until I figured out that they were just being guided to not disturb my neighbors garden, that holds berries that birds like to devour. They were being guided away from where they usually return.

Thinking about this, we can also be guided, but why can’t we break free on our own?

It’s about time each of us left the nest of our comfort zone, where we regurgitate what we are told and repeat the calls of hatred and greed back the exact way we hear them. It’s time to fly away and become more than just birds, but become our own.