Drug and Alcohol Deterrents: Let Mother Nature, Birds Be Your Guide

I was reading the news the other day and came across a story about a man who was only 36 years old who had just been sentenced to death in the state of Virginia. His crime? He killed another man by beating him to death, to get access to crack cocaine. It made me feel horrified and sad to know that two lives had been cut short over something as stupid and harmful as drugs.

Mulling this over, I gazed out of my office window and watched a bird flit by with amazing speed and control of his flight path. It got me thinking about birds and their lives. Plain and simple, birds don't do drugs! Why could this be? Well, for one thing, they are too busy living. Spend 10 minutes, uninterrupted, watching one bird sometime, and you'll see what I am saying. They are so full of energy and life--so busy flying, doing, and being! They are looking for food, feeding their young, building nests, taking a sweet little bird bath. They are raiding your bird feeder, throwing all of your neatly organized seed all over the ground. They are waking you up at 6AM, letting you know with their incessant chirps and tunes, that it is time to get up and get going!

Birds, and many other animals, especially those you can see right in your yard, or at the park, are consumed with the task, or rather it seems, the joy, of simply living, and doing what they do. They don't take the time to be addicts. They don't need drugs to complete their daily tasks, or to cope with the misfortunes that happen to them. They just keep living. Each and every day of their energetic lives, they really seem to give this business of living their best shot.

I think we could learn a great deal from our fine feathered friends. Being members of the human race, we are supposedly more intelligent than any other creature upon the face of this earth. We should be able to have, and do have, as far as we know, the best qualities intellectually, emotionally, and otherwise, to be properly equipped to overcome most any obstacle that life throws at us. Instead, many of us allow ourselves to become weakened by our problems, and escape them in a drug or alcohol-induced haze of our minds.

I know all of this is so much easier said than done, depending on your own personal situation, but I feel that much can be said about looking to the birds as a silent inspiration as to how to live our lives more fully. It takes strength of character and mind to remove mental crutches or pain relievers from our lives, such as drugs and alcohol. It also takes a great deal of strength in the younger portion of our lives, not to get interested or hooked on these harmful substances to begin with.

But if a little tiny bird, such as a wren, weighing only a few ounces, with only a fragment of your brain power, can lead a full life without the use of drugs, shouldn't you be able to, as well? Maybe it is time that we see, during the times when we feel that we don't have enough strength to keep ourselves together, that we can turn to a little tiny bird outside our window rather than a bottle of booze.

Mother Nature knows what we all need to survive, and we have been equipped with all the necessary physical traits and coping mechanisms already. Perhaps it is a lack of belief in our inner strength that causes us to turn to outside harmful substances, instead of relying on our inner instinctive intuition and fortitude. I make a sincere request of you, or you can take it as a challenge, that the next time you feel like getting wasted or high, or that things are not going well for you, spend about a half hour in nature, focusing on one bird or one creature. Notice how they are handling things with their lives, and take inspiration from them. Try to turn your negative internal feelings into external bliss. Enjoy all the life all around you. Perhaps it was put there for you, just for that purpose. To inspire, to encourage, and to defeat negativity. I challenge you to look to nature to assist yourself in defeating negativity today! Birds don't do drugs!