Same Same, but Different

The highlight of a recent walk was the five ducklings swimming alongside the path that rounds the Palace of Fine Arts and its small lake. I am rarely down in that area except to pass through, and I don’t believe I’ve so much as stretched my legs there since I was a kid going to the Tactile Dome at the Exploratorium. It seemed necessary that I go by at least once this week, since I am staying just a few blocks away. This was primarily a “get out of the house” stroll; in fact I spent much of my time simply sitting on a bench with my face to the late setting sun.

Why are ducklings so doggone cute? Sure, baby things generally are, but ducklings have those rounded, upturned, smiling duckbills going for them. And they watch you, their little rapid-fire webbed feet paddling underwater, their fluffy little bodies shooting along the surface. It’s impossible to imagine a duckling in a bad mood, and I can’t help thinking they are cheeky and up for just about anything. I could use some of that right now.

Four of these little guys looked very much alike, mostly brown with matching yellow markings, and the fifth was the exact inverse of this and I wondered if it knew. And if so, how how did it feel about it? Is it an exclusively human trait to hold ourselves apart, to fixate on the things that we erroneously believe make us irrevocably different from everybody else? Sitting on my bench, watching the tourists snap pictures of themselves with the Palace in the background, I caught myself clocking the differences between us: different languages, different clothing choices, different bodies, different ways of looking at the world, surely, and of looking at me, different different different; and I thought, what about the sameness? That, for instance, we were all drawn to that very location at that very moment. That seems a large thing to me somehow.

The Walk: 1.2 miles