On my way to work yesterday morning, I saw a bird sitting in the middle of the road.

Not flying. Not hopping. Just sitting there. Meditating, it seemed.

I drove past it before my brain registered what I had seen. Then I stopped my car.

The first time this happened was a year ago.

It happened the same way, on the same road, on my way to work. A baby bird sat on the road as I drove up to it. As I walked towards it and scooped it up with my hands, its impossibly bright yellow beak opened wide, as if expecting breakfast from me. I carried it well away from the road and tucked it into the safety of the surrounding greenery.

So this was the second time I was taking a bird away from the dangers of the road, except this time, it was on the opposite side of traffic.

As I stopped my car and turned my blinkers on, a green vehicle came barreling down the road towards the bird.

I remember the feeling in my stomach.

I watched the entire scenario in my side mirror: the car passed directly over the bird. The little body spun and rolled across the pavement.

Somehow, the bird was alive.

When I reached it, there was no obvious injury. No blood. No mangled wing. It seemed dazed, certainly, but alive. I picked it up and carried it toward the bushes on the other side of the road.

Before I could even place it down, it miraculously launched itself from my hands and disappeared into a bush.

The whole thing took less than a minute, but it stayed with me all day.

I had almost seen something devastating. Instead, I witnessed life continuing.

The funny thing is that this happened on the last day at the school that I work at, the end of another school year.

This was not just any old school year, either. It was hands down my all-time favorite one. One of those rare years where the children, the families, and the teaching team somehow come together in a way that feels magical and right.

The children graduated. I stood to the side and led them through songs we’d practiced for months. The parents cheered. Some cried. There was an after-party hosted by one of the families.

It was a day full of pride and love and endings.

The bird and the preschool graduation don’t seem unrelated to me. They’re both encounters with something precious I couldn’t keep, only care for while it was in front of me.

When Nature Rhymes With Our Life

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Earlier, my boss had told me a story about her daughter preparing to leave for college. The night before, her daughter had found a baby bird outside its nest.

My boss couldn’t help but notice the metaphor. Here was her daughter standing at the threshold of adulthood, feeling all the emotions that come with leaving home, and there at her feet was a fledgling that had quite literally left the nest.

Then I told her my bird story.

We both stood there for a moment in awe of the strange ways life sometimes rhymes.

Not because we thought the universe was sending coded messages through birds, but because these separate moments seemed to share a common emotional shape.

A daughter leaving home.

Children graduating.

A school year ending.

A bird nearly lost.

Sometimes what moves us isn’t that nature is sending a message. It’s that our lives and the natural world occasionally rhyme with each other. We notice a scene outside ourselves and suddenly recognize something happening inside ourselves or someone we love.

I spent the evening sitting on my patio with my cat, watching sunlight flicker through the birch tree outside my apartment, trying to understand why the bird had affected me so deeply.

And I think I figured it out.

It wasn’t the bird.

It was the “almost.”

We live most of our lives not thinking of how many things could have gone differently.

The conversation we almost didn’t have.

The person we almost never met.

The accident we almost got into.

The diagnosis that almost was.

The relationship that almost ended.

The bird that almost died.

Most days, life feels inevitable. We move through it as though events unfold exactly as they were always meant to.

Near-misses disrupt that illusion: they reveal how much of life is held together by timing, inches, and chance.

Maybe that’s why the experience filled me with such disproportionate gratitude.

For one brief moment, I stood at the narrow gap between loss and continuation and got to witness which way the story turned.

And on a day already full of goodbyes, endings, and transitions, I found myself unexpectedly grateful for the power of almost.