Project Vision 21

In 2005, a zoo in Sedgwick, Kansas, United States, brought back from Africa a flamingo, listed as Number 492 among the animals in that zoo. But before the flamingo could definitively join its companions also captured in Africa, the flamingo flew away and was only found now, healthy, happy, and living among pelicans on the Texas coast.

Having visited zoos in various cities, my question has always been why other flamingos don’t do what Number 492 did: fly away. After all, it is known that these are birds capable of traveling long distances in their migrations. However, there they remain at the zoo, without flying, even with bars, walls, or nets to stop them from flying.

I assumed flamingos in zoos don't fly away because their wings are clipped, but that’s not the case. Number 492's story explains that the wings of those birds remain intact. However, the zoo staff (by some procedure unknown to me) prevents the flamingos from developing the mature feathers they need to fly.

And so, the flamingos stay there, in their little pond, with the open sky above them and with their wings intact, but unable to fly because external factors stop the growth of the appropriate feathers for flight.

Leaving aside the flamingos and speaking now of ourselves, I wonder in how many ways we are prevented from “taking flight”, that is, from becoming mature, independent. and self-sufficient adults, even if we have our “wings” intact.

In other words, how is it possible that we remain “stuck” in the same small “pond” all our lives when there is no physical barrier that prevents us from taking flight? Or maybe the real question is: what prevents us from growing those “feathers” (metaphorically speaking) that would lift us up to reach our true potential?

When education is dedicated only to training the next generation of employees, but not to training people; when religions demand blind adherence to a creed, but do not transform people; when spiritual practices become inoperative resale items; when that happens, we don't learn to fly.

And even if all that fails, if for some reason someone goes through their first two decades of life without having lost their ability to fly, there are still other elements around us whose sole purpose is to deactivate our ability of connecting with our best version and live at that level of authenticity.

More precisely, every single screen in front of our eyes is there to prevent us from seeing beyond that screen, to shrink our horizon to a minimum, to trim our adult feathers, to encourage and expand our loss of cognitive and critical thinking skills.

At this precise moment in history when we stop thinking (and, therefore, we no longer see the future because the future is open thinking about possibilities), artificial intelligence almost thinks for itself, according to a recent report by MIT. Totally unbelievable: we humans can’t think, and AI is now thinking. My congratulations to Flamenco Number 492 for flying away.