Singing Our Song Even If No One is Listening

Finding our unique songs we each can bring to the world not only bring us individual thrills and meaning, but they can also be deeply moving for the few lucky enough to hear them piercing the night sky, being sung just because we feel the song welling up inside of us and presently bubbles out with laughter and joy.

I heard a bird pierce the summer evening sky just as I was getting home tonight. It was so stirring that I stopped what I was doing and scanned the area where the sound seemed to be coming from. I saw a small dot of color on a roof maybe 20 yards away. The bird wasn’t spectacularly colored or endowed with any true unique characters.

I held out my phone with an app that identified birds by their songs and waiting with held breath for the bird to sound again. It sang the same refrain as before and the app identified the song as coming from a Song Sparrow. Sparrows aren’t known for being flashy, or overly vivacious or exotic. In fact, sparrows are used as symbols in novels meant to signify the forgotten, the forlorn or barely scraping by. When the New Testament references the fall of a sparrow, they are using the bird as a reference to the fact that God remembers even a sparrow, meaning that most of the time, most of us don’t give sparrows much notice, fallen or otherwise.

It’s so easy to make animals assume human-like qualities and aspirations. Maybe the sparrow was just singing because he was chemically induced to do so. Or perhaps instinct called to let mates know it was around and willing to explore perpetuating its genetic code with a neighboring bird. But when I heard that passionate song tonight, singing a hauntingly beautiful solo with no one other than maybe myself to notice, it made me wonder why the bird bothered.

And by subsequent thought processes, why do we ever go beyond what is expecting or act in altruistic ways? Why do we care deeply about friends and family but also strangers who we see we can help? Biologically or economically or politically it doesn’t make much sense at all. In the traditional sense, we are supposed to be self-interested utility maximizing machines driven by rewards and repulsed by punishment.

But when I think of the perhaps lonely hunter from the distant human past who painted his mural in a cave that no one would applaud him for during his life, I get an inkling of why the Song Sparrow sings its song to no one but itself. What songs do we have inside of each of us that only we can sing for no one but ourselves? But brings us such visceral joy that it might be nice to share the experience with others, but you can enjoy completely on your own too?

Finding those unique songs we each can bring to the world not only bring us individual joy and meaning, but they can also be deeply moving for the few lucky enough to hear it piercing the night sky, being sung just because we feel the song welling up inside of us and presently bubbles out with joy.