When I was a kid there were allot of birds around. In fairy tales there were Nightingale’s. For a while, whenever bird song could be heard I ask my parents if what we heard was that beautiful singing all those stories referred to. It never was. That, and the factoid my dad mentioned that these bird were extremely rare, made eventually give up to listen for one.
Growing up also seems to entail that one learns about wonderful things only then to eventually realize that they’ll remain elusive.
Decades went by, and I had still not heard a Nightingale sing, still had a very specific idea of how it must be sounding. And I thought this imagination would be the closest I would ever get to the concept I heard about when I was young.
Right now I hear them every day. I would have not expected to experience that. I actually was certain that it would be naive to expect that I ever would.