On Necessary Birds

There comes a point in the questioning when you realize the hollowness at the core of adult authority. It arrives differently for each parent — mine came on a sandy path along the Mediterranean, when my four-year-old son asked why birds exist. The question should have been simple. I had answered dozens before it with the practiced automation of parenthood, had navigated the labyrinth of “limatha” (why) with reflexive confidence. But standing there, watching Palestinian sunbirds scatter like prayer beads thrown across dawn light, I understood that I had never questioned their necessity, had accepted their presence as one accepts gravity. In that moment of hesitation before answering, I glimpsed the arbitrary construction of certainty upon which we build our days.

To lack an answer for your child is to confront the possibility that you have been living thoughtlessly. We pride ourselves on the veneer of competence, on the fluency with which we explain the mechanics of the world, until we reach the wall where explanation falters. The truly humbling moments of parenthood arrive not when a child misbehaves but when they expose the thinness of our understanding. “Limatha nahtaj tuyor?” — Why do we need birds? The question implies necessity, suggests a world where creatures must justify their existence through utility. I found myself, at forty-one, caught between the ecological answer I could recite from textbooks and the truth that was unfurling in me like a sail catching wind: that necessity itself is the illusion.