Our family spent Christmas 2018 travelling around Antarctica on an expedition boat.
We were able to go ashore every day, so we visited a lot of penguin colonies.
I have hundreds of pictures of penguins.
Pictures of them in their nests.
Pictures of them cooing.
And dozens of clips of them walking.
I loved watching the Penguins.
They’re cute,
Funny.
They make you laugh out loud.
But what you don’t see
when you look at pretty pictures of penguins
is that they poop everywhere.
And their poop stinks …
and they fall into it …
so they are covered with poop …
And they stink.
It’s a lesson in perceptions.
We see the surface of things,
of people,
and of promises.
We see what we want to see.
We don’t always SEE what stinks.
I love penguins.
I cherish the time spent learning about them,
laughing even as I took the 40th picture of the same one.
And I also cherish the realization that
what we see in a picture
doesn’t reveal what stinks.
Don’t get drawn in by the seeming
perfection of others lives.
Remember, poop stinks.
