May 6th, 2026
My wife Teresa is in love. I’ve made my peace with it. The objects of her affection happen to be small, fast, fiercely independent, and capable of disappearing on her without warning. They are hummingbirds, and she keeps a small kingdom of them between our home in Paradise Valley and our place up in Sedona.
She’s got feeders at both houses, and cameras pointed at the Sedona feeders so she can watch them while we’re in Paradise Valley. More than once I’ve found her leaning toward her phone like a grandmother spying on grandchildren, whispering, “Look at him, the little show-off.” She buys the good nectar, and the birds know the difference. When she walks out with a fresh batch, they come at her from every direction, like she’s ringing the dinner bell at a Sunday picnic.
But the more I’ve watched these little creatures, the more I’ve come to believe they’re not just beautiful. They’re carrying around a couple of life lessons in those tiny chests, and we ought to lean down and listen.
Take the matter of their migration. Every fall, the Ruby-throated hummingbird, a creature that weighs about as much as a penny, sets its sights on the Gulf of Mexico. Five hundred miles of open water. No rest stops. No roadside diners. No friendly oil rig guaranteed at the halfway mark. Just sky and sea and a single, stubborn intention. They fly it nonstop, sometimes for twenty straight hours, often through the night. To prepare, they spend weeks gorging on nectar and insects until they nearly double their body weight, going from about three grams to six. By the time they reach the other side, some are down to two and a half grams, lighter than the day they started fattening up. They’ve burned themselves nearly to the wick to get where they’re going.
Now, I’d wager a fair sum that not one of those birds, sitting on a branch the morning of departure, ever thinks, I wonder if I’ll fail. Not one of them is hedging, or holding a backup plan in his other pocket, or waiting for conditions to be a touch more agreeable. He goes. Body, mind, heart, every flutter of muscle, all in.
Some don’t make it. The Gulf is a hard teacher. But the ones who do make it succeed because they didn’t entertain the alternative for a single second.
Humans, by comparison, often approach challenging endeavors cautiously, questioning whether it's a good idea. We carry our doubts alongside our commitment and then wonder why the load feels so heavy. The hummingbird carries no such freight. He’s small, he’s outmatched, he’s got a thousand reasons to stay home. He goes anyway. And he goes completely.
Here’s the second thing about hummingbirds, and it surprised me when I learned it.
For a creature so famous for its motion, the hummingbird has mastered the art of stopping. On cold nights, when nectar is scarce and the air is working against him, he doesn’t fight the cold; he agrees with it. He enters a state called torpor, dropping his body temperature by as much as fifty degrees and slowing his heart from over a thousand beats a minute to as few as fifty. He looks, for all practical purposes, dead. You could pick him up and not know he was alive. Then, when the sun returns and the world turns hospitable again, he warms himself back up, shakes off the night, and gets back to the business of being a hummingbird.
He doesn’t burn himself out trying to keep up his usual hundred-mile-an-hour pace through a night that doesn’t want him moving. He conserves. He waits. He trusts the morning.
We sometimes treat rest like surrender, and stillness like laziness, and the long nights of life like something to be muscled through with caffeine and willpower. But the most energetic creature on earth knows something we don’t. There’s a time to fly five hundred miles without stopping, and there’s a time to hang upside down on a branch and let the world pass over you. Wisdom is knowing which kind of night you’re in.
Teresa, of course, knew all of this before I did. She’s just too kind to tell me. She fills the feeders, watches the cameras and hopes her tiny friends' wisdom permeates me.
I can be a stubborn student. But I’m learning.
