It’s another gray day in the Poconos filled with gloom and doom. I’m watching songbirds through my glass door flit back and forth at my feeder. Against this bleak January morning, their bright colors are a welcoming sight to my eyes.

I sit back and my mind goes everywhere.

I wonder how these little winged creatures, the same ones that filled their bellies here before Christmas with the wind chill at -24 degrees, can survive almost anything. I wonder how their feathers can protect their tiny bodies from the frigid cold.

And sometimes, in their excitement at the feeder, they fly into the glass door with a thump, but pick themselves up and continue on with their frenetic activity.

Somehow my mind then turns to a professional football player who wore shoulder pad protection that laces at the chest level, but was knocked unconscious after a collision, so badly that he needed CPR to revive him.

Nature is amazing with her built-in protection systems for all creatures, big and small, but the football player is so vulnerable to injury despite all the high tech armor he wears upon his body.

I love football, but I wonder how much we have progressed since the gladiator battles in the Roman Colosseum.

Humans have this insatiable appetite to watch strong men crash violently into each other. I coached the sport for 17 years and I love the strategies of the game and the excitement that the athletes bring to the arena, but after seeing the Buffalo Bills’ player fall backward to the field, I’m glad my son gave up playing the game when he was only 9 years old.

On another topic, I have recently discovered facts about my ancestors that leave me wondering who was the absolute first man and woman of the Strack lineage to send their genetic chemistry into my body some several centuries later.

For that matter, who was the first child ever born in this universe and who gave birth to his or her parents? I wonder are we all descendants of Adam and Eve or were there more immaculate conceptions than the world-famous birth that we Christians have come to believe? We had to have an origin from somebody.

Then I ask myself why people often think they need to change themselves either physically or emotionally. Are they aware that change might bring them more unhappiness than before and then what? Why can’t we find ways to love who we were meant to be from the day of our birth?

That said, there is one change I believe would be healthy for all Americans and that is to be open to changing our minds.

I know a man who votes Republican every year and refuses to listen to any other party’s candidate’s views on the issues. He told me he’d vote for Bugs Bunny if he ran for office as a Republican. I wonder why so many people are stubborn with what they believe. American drama critic Brooks Atkinson once said, “The most fatal illusion is the settled point of view. Since life is growth and motion, a fixed point of view kills anybody who has one.”

I watch a nuthatch poke his beak into my feeder. These amazing birds feed upside down and I imagine if we humans could stand on our heads and wash our faces in the cold snow or rub our noses in the warm summer grass, we might realize the healing benefits that the good earth offers us that comes at no cost instead of buying chemical remedies to help us feel better.

My mind jumps all over the place and here’s one of those jumps. I wonder why spectators on a golf course have to be very quiet when a professional golfer lines up his putt on the green, but in the game of professional baseball, 60,000 fans scream their lungs out at a batter who has less than one second to try to swing his bat at a 100 mph fastball.

I wonder why so many movies end with the main character being unhappy. One system of beliefs we discussed in my philosophy class was existentialism. This belief states that we have the agonizing free will to find our purpose in life and discounts the existence of God to help us along. Many acclaimed movies depict the ultimate downfall of the existentialist that leaves us shaking our heads at the end. Man drinks a cup of coffee in his tiny, gloomy kitchen. He finds love and happiness with a woman and his life is full of joy. The joy is short lived. They break up and at the end of the film, he’s alone again sipping coffee in his gloomy kitchen. Our lives are hard enough. Shouldn’t we want our entertainment to lift us into happy endings and allow us an escape from the reality of day to day life?

As I watch two large squirrels eat bird seed spilled onto the floor of my deck, I wonder if we humans try too damn hard to find joy and happiness by moving in the wrong directions.

Here, I have sat for an hour thoroughly enjoying the wildlife outside my sliding doors. Mother Nature invites me into her world of wonder. The birds and the squirrels in the gloom of a cloudy January morning lift my mind outside the responsibilities of my life that I still have waiting for me.

Oh, they’ll get done at some point as will tomorrow’s duties and the next day’s, too.

But until then, I will cherish this simple joy leaving me wondering why these creatures are content to have so little while many of us are discontent with having so much.

Rich Strack can be reached at richiesadie11@gmail.com