There's a type of bird named the hummingbird. I wonder if you know about it too?
Hummingbirds are the smallest birds in the world. The tiniest species, the Bee Hummingbird of Cuba measures just over 2 inches (5 cm). Their wings beat anywhere from 12 times per second in the largest species to over 80 times per second in the smallest.
There are many fascinating facts about them, but here's the one that stopped me in my tracks the first time I heard it:
Its heart beats about 1,200 times per minute.
Twelve. Hundred. Times.
Just imagine; In the time it takes you to read this sentence, a hummingbird's heart has already beaten more times than yours will in about half an hour.
That's twenty beats every second,
a constant drum of urgency, survival, and purpose tucked into a body no bigger than a child's thumb.
A life lived on the edge, fast, fragile, furious, and astonishingly beautiful.
For a long time, I thought the hummingbird was just another pretty creature nature designed for aesthetic pleasure, nice for documentaries, even nicer for wallpapers.
But that changed the day I learned something else:
The hummingbird spends so much energy staying alive that if it stops eating for just a few hours, it dies.
So it must consume more than its body weight in nectar every day.
Every day is a race: fuel up or fade out.
It sounded like exhaustion wrapped in wings.
Yet people who've watched hummingbirds closely will tell you the same thing:
It doesn't look tired.
It looks intentional.
Focused.
Purposeful.
And that's when I began to understand why this tiny bird often shows up in the stories of people who've survived storms that should have swallowed them whole. People who didn't have the luxury of stopping because life would have devoured them if they did.
Maybe you know what that feels like too.
To live so intensely, so alert, so stretched, because pausing feels dangerous.
A few months ago, I was sitting in my friend's living room at sundown, sipping water and trying to find a moment of silence. I had been drained for days. Life felt like it kept demanding morevfrom me while giving nothing back.
A documentary was playing on the TV. I wasn't watching it, not really, until something blurred across the screen. A hummingbird.
The narrator spoke calmly, almost too calmly for a creature so magnificent.
It hovered above a hibiscus flower, wings invisible from sheer speed.
It was breathtaking to say the least, like watching physics bend out of respect for nature. It dipped into one flower, then another, then another, almost frantic but still impossibly graceful.
For a second, it paused. Or maybe it was the cameraman's genius.
Its wings slowed just enough for me to see them, thin, delicate, trembling with effort. Its body quivered under the intensity of simply staying alive.
And then, suddenly, it rested on a branch.
A full stop.
A silence.
The narrator paused too, and it struck me how many things we only hear when we finally pay attention.
That's when it happened, the quiet revelation that hit me like a cold wave:
Even the hummingbird rests.
Even the creature that would die if it didn't keep going takes a moment to breathe.
It was such a small thing, almost forgettable.
Yet it rewired something major in my brain.
All my life, I'd been conditioned to push. To keep moving. To never slow down.
(Most first daughters may understand this instinct.)
Because slowing down meant falling behind, and falling behind meant being forgotten.
So we keep going. Even when we're tired.
Even when our hearts are doing their own version of 1,200 beats per minute.
When the realization finally hit me, I laughed out loud, startling my friend.
Here I was, complaining about being too tired to live my own life, while this bird was burning through her entire existence at a rate that would kill me, and she was doing it with marvel.
I had never seen a creature more enthralling.
She wasn't stressed.
She wasn't analyzing the enormity of how many flowers she needed to visit.
She wasn't postponing life until she felt "ready."
She was simply living it. Flower by flower, moment by moment, and geartbeat by impossible heartbeat.
I thought about my own heart, beating its quiet 70–72 times per minute, and how I had been treating it as if I had all the time in the world. How often I waited for the perfect moment to act, because I believed I needed more time, more courage or more certainty.
Then, I noticed how shee didn't visit every flower present. Some she bypassed entirely, heading straight for the ones that would sustain her. She didn't waste energy on flowers that had already been emptied or ones that weren't yet blooming. Somehow, she knew which moments mattered.
That was the second lesson:
Being busy is not the same as being alive.
Moving fast is not the same as moving forward. The hummingbird wasn't frantically rushing everywhere, she was purposefully going exactly where she needed to go.
Meanwhile, I had been wearing my exhaustion like a badge of honor.
"I'm so busy" really meant "Look how important I am." "look how needed I am." But the hummingbird didn't look busy. She looked alive.
She hovered at the trumpet vine for a long moment, her tiny form suspended in the golden morning light, and I realized that despite her speed, despite that racing heart, she was more present than I'd been in months. She was completely there, in that single moment, at that single flower. Not thinking about the last flower or the next flower. Just this one.
When she finally flew away, disappearing into the sky like a jewel thrown into the sun, I sat there for a long time. My coffee was cold. The weeds were still winning. But something had shifted in me.
So whatever season you're in, whether you're racing through tasks, fighting silent battles, or trying to stay afloat with a heart that feels like it's beating too fast...
remember this:
You can be small and still be powerful.
Survival takes energy, so don't apologize for replenishing.
Beauty and struggle can coexist.
Speed doesn't have to mean chaos.
And most importantly, you are allowed to pause.
Sometimes, I wonder if the hummingbird knows she's a miracle. I wonder if she knows that her impossibly fast heart, the very thing that makes her existence so precarious, is also what makes her able to do things no other bird can do. To hover, to fly backward, to hang suspended in midair and sip nectar from a flower while the whole world rushes past.
Maybe that's the final lesson: our limitations, the very things that make life urgent, brief and fragile, may also be what makes our lives beautiful.
We don't have forever and our hearts won't beat indefinitely. But that isn't a tragedy, it's an invitation.
To live now, choose carefully, and hover in the moments that matter.
To be, like the hummingbird, impossibly alive
Driven by purpose and fueled by survival.