Low diatribe

Three pink blobs with flappy yellow beaks. That's what my wife brought in after the storm — freshly hatched, eyes sealed shut, barely breathing. She had found them scattered in the yard among the fallen branches, their nest somewhere in the wreckage above.

The next morning, two had gone quiet. One kept screaming.

The internet suggested it was a starling. The photos matched: that desperate yellow gape, the translucent skin, the way it threw its whole body into each cry for food. We mixed the internet-provided recipe — cat food and applesauce, warmed slightly — to shove in the tiny thing's gullet every time it demanded attention. Which started out at about every 6 minutes.

For days, our mornings began with screaming. Not the gentle chirping you might imagine, but full-throated, relentless demands that pulled us from sleep and kept us tethered to the kitchen counter, mixing another batch of bird porridge. The pink blob grew fuzz, and feedings stretched to 15 minutes apart. Eyes opened, fixed on us with startling intelligence.

Imprinting, they call it. The first faces a bird sees become its world.

The fuzz grew into feathers, and we could wait half an hour between meals. The flappy yellow beak darkened and sharpened, and suddenly the bird was able to feed itself, literally forgetting how to be hand-fed.

Six weeks later, Valya — as we'd named her — was making hesitant flights around our house. No longer the helpless thing we'd rescued, but not quite ready for the world outside either. She'd learned to feed herself but still called to us when uncertain, still sought the warmth of proximity when the house grew quiet.

Today she's nearly full-grown, wings strong enough to carry her anywhere she chooses. But she chooses here. This house, these people who answered her first cries. She began mimicking the sounds of our house — the coffee maker's gurgle, the squeak of the front door, fledgling renditions of the R2-D2 noises we play for her to learn. My wife sometimes says we're teaching her C-3PO by mistake. I never correct her because the thought of Valya flying around saying "We're doomed!" delights me too much. She's building her vocabulary from the rhythms of the place that saved her.

There's something profound in watching a creature grow from complete dependence to capable independence while choosing connection. Valya didn't have to stay. She could have followed instinct out the window, joined the flocks that gather in our trees each evening. Instead, she built her world around the relationship that saved her.

Leadership often feels like the inverse of this story. We start with connection — teams that trust, cultures that care — and somehow end up with creatures who've learned to survive on their own but forgotten why they chose to stay. We feed the urgent demands, respond to the loudest voices, keep everyone alive and functional. But somewhere in the daily maintenance, we lose the imprinting that made it matter.

The teams I'm proudest of weren't held together by process or hierarchy. They were bound by something closer to what Valya shows us: the choice to remain connected even when you're strong enough to leave. The recognition that growth doesn't require abandoning the relationships that made growth possible.

Maybe that's what we're really building when we lead well. Not just capable people, but people who choose to stay not because they have to, but because they remember who answered when they called.

But there's another layer to what Valya has shown me, something that emerged slowly in the day-to-day work of caring for her: how to genuinely lead with curiosity instead of frustration.

Being a mammal, I find a bird's motives completely foreign. When she suddenly flies to the ceiling and won't come down, when she ignores food I know she likes, when she calls insistently for reasons I can't decode — I've learned to approach these moments with genuine curiosity rather than the need to fix or control. What is she experiencing that I'm not seeing? What does she need that I haven't considered?

This shift has been profound. And it's changed how I am with my grandchildren.

Where I might once have met an inexplicable meltdown with my own frustration, I now find myself actually curious: what is this small person experiencing that I can't see? What need are they expressing that I haven't recognized? The same patience I've developed for Valya's bird logic has opened space for the equally alien but equally valid logic of an autistic five-year-old.

This approach — leading with curiosity instead of the need to control — has deepened something fundamental in how I think about leadership itself. The best leaders I've worked with shared this quality: they sought first to understand rather than to be understood. They approached the inexplicable behaviors of their teams, the seemingly irrational decisions of stakeholders, the foreign logic of different departments, with genuine curiosity rather than immediate judgment.

The bird who lived taught me this: survival is just the beginning. What matters is what you do with the strength that caring gave you. But she's also taught me that caring itself is a practice — one that grows richer when we approach the incomprehensible with curiosity rather than the need to understand on our own terms.