I looked up from my Series Seven Security Training Manual at lunch today and watched a flock of pigeons groping for food. I noticed one stray from the group. He pecked around until he found what must have been a two-day old piece of something that wasn’t quite fit for human consumption then, and even less now. But it was quite a find for the pigeon, as the earnestness of his pecks divulged. Immediately, another pigeon came over and took his swipes at the morsel until a third bird arrived, took his turn, and so on.

It dawned on me that the previous feeders did not fight for the food. Regardless of the scarcity of anything else in the area to feed on, they all gracefully bowed out of the feast when the next arrived.

“Why, this is not very instinctual of them. If I had been one of those pigeons, I would have flown off with the piece and consumed it for myself. After all, isn’t that the name of the game? ‘Survival of the fittest,’ and all that. He who dies with the most toys – or eats the most two day old bread – wins? It should be an automatic, especially for a lonely pigeon operating on mere id to fight for as much fuel for its DNA as possible.”

But they shared. And not reluctantly. Then it hit me.

If these pigeons, operating without reason, logic, and all the other man-made devices for psyche, were sharing, then there must be some basic natural law at work here. Perhaps it was this simple act of graceful surrender that kept that pigeon, that flock, that species alive and evolving. For when they practiced it, it meant that it would happen over and over again. Simple logic tells me that more will eat more food when more birds are looking and sharing what they find in a lifetime than what one bird eating all it finds alone in a lifetime.

Then I thought, “What a magnificent pigeon, that first sharing pigeon was.”