Leo is a pigeon who lives in a city park.
His life follows a strict routine: at 7:00 a.m. sharp, he lands by the fountain in the square to wait for tourists to feed him breadcrumbs; at noon, he takes a nap on the branches of an oak tree; in the afternoon, he fights with his friends over a dropped potato chip.
Leo is very fat, and his flying skills are terrible.
“Hey, Leo, take off!” his friends always call out to him. Whenever there’s a disturbance, or they need to fly up to a statue high above, the other birds flap their wings and gracefully trace a beautiful arc through the air.
Only Leo would take a running start, flapping a few times like a clumsy penguin, then barely “lift” himself off the ground, stumbling to his destination, panting heavily.
“Why don’t you practice flying?” a young sparrow once asked curiously. “The sky is so freeing.”
Leo shook out his feathers and slowly pecked at the cookie crumbs on the ground: “Freedom is too tiring. Besides, as long as I don’t fly, I’ll never have to leave the ground. There’s an endless supply of bread here—why would I go up there to catch the cold wind?”
And so the days passed, one after another. Leo became the most “settled” bird in the park. He didn’t need to migrate, didn’t need to dodge strong winds at high altitudes, and didn’t need to worry about being targeted by birds of prey. He felt he had made the wisest choice—by giving up the ability to fly, he could exchange it for a stable life.
Until that late autumn afternoon.
The park administration suddenly announced that, in order to restore the statue, the plaza would be closed for an entire week, and visitors were strictly prohibited from feeding the birds.
Panic spread instantly among the flock. Although the other birds grumbled, they soon flapped their wings and soared over the wall, flying toward residential areas a few blocks away or to a forest even farther out.
Leo stood in the empty square, his stomach growling with hunger. Watching his companions’ receding figures, he thought to himself, “It’s okay. I’ll just wait by the wall—maybe a kind janitor will toss me some scraps.”
On the first day, he managed to catch a few flies.
On the second day, he was so hungry he felt dizzy and was almost too weak to stand.
On the third day, a stray cat set its sights on him.
The cat didn’t pounce right away, but instead paced elegantly around Leo, as if admiring a main course about to be served. Leo instinctively wanted to flee. He flapped his wings frantically and kicked his feet, trying to fly up into the nearby oak tree, which wasn’t particularly tall.
But his body was too heavy, and his wing muscles had long since atrophied. He flapped for a while, but only managed to rise half a meter off the ground before crashing heavily back onto the concrete.
The stray cat narrowed its eyes, let out a low purr, and slowly closed in.
Leo closed his eyes in despair. In that moment, he suddenly realized an utterly absurd truth: he had chosen “not to fly” in order to live more safely; but precisely because he had chosen “not to fly,” he now didn’t even have a chance to survive.
In order to escape the dangers of the sky, he had ultimately trapped himself in a hopeless situation on the ground.
Just as the cat’s paw was about to touch the tip of his nose, a sudden gust of wind swept across the square. It was the biting wind characteristic of late autumn.
The wind was so strong it whipped up fallen leaves and dust from the ground. The stray cat squinted against the wind and instinctively took a step back.
Leo was blown by the wind and rolled twice on the ground. Suddenly, he felt his body grow light.
It wasn’t because he wanted to fly, but because the wind was so strong that it literally “lifted” his clumsy, round body right up, just like a withered leaf.
He tumbled through the air, swept along by the wind without a shred of dignity, over the wall, across the street, and finally crashed heavily onto an unfamiliar lawn.
The wind died down.
Leo scrambled up from the grass, looking a mess and covered in dirt and grass clippings. He looked around—this wasn’t a park, but a quiet residential backyard.
An old crow preening its feathers perched on the fence, staring at him coldly: “Hey, fatso, did the wind blow you here?”
Leo panted, looking at his wings—which had atrophied somewhat from a long lack of exercise—and then up at the sky above him, the very sky he had once dismissed as “too tiring.”
He suddenly realized that the gust of wind that had lifted him up a moment ago wasn’t as terrifying as he’d imagined.
“Maybe,” Leo murmured to himself, a glimmer of hope he’d never felt before shining in his eyes, “next time the wind comes, I can try not to close my eyes.”
He flapped his wings—still clumsily, but for the first time, he felt that the sky wasn’t quite so out of reach after all.
