Waiting for a Shortcut/Hack?
In Nigeria there is generally some noise going on from sunup to sundown (and if there’s a football match, then in the evenings too, but that’s beside the point). But this morning, I woke up with an additional noise. It was the sound of a hen clucking and, well, she sounded like she was in distress.
“Some of the neighborhood children, no doubt, terrorizing this poor bird,” I thought with pity.
But breakfast went by, and the chicken was still squawking, for lack of a better word. I ignored her as I brushed my teeth. When I went into my day, somewhere in my subconscious I heard that chicken. So after about three hours of hearing this bird almost non-stop, I decided to investigate.
We live in a double-story house, but the house on the other side of the wall is still under construction. It’s got a ground floor, but the owners ran out of money during the building of the second floor (first floor, in some countries). So while the walls and roof of the ground floor was build, and solidly too, I might add, that was about all there was to this structure. The roof of the unfinished building was flat with stairs leading up from the far side. Since I was standing at a window on our second floor (first floor, in some countries), I could look over that flat roof with ease.
I looked past the buildings to see the little village scene that is behind our house, and saw nothing out of the ordinary. Women walked with bundles and burdens on their heads. Little children played out of doors, oblivious to the cares around them. The creek past the village had the usual little boats on it. The bank on the other side of the creek had its usual activity.
At that moment, the chicken decided to let out a panicked shriek. As I looked to see where the noise could be coming from, I saw a bantam hen standing on the edge of the roof, right under the window I was looking out of. She was inching her ‘toes’ closer and closer to the edge.
One floor up and another chicken down on the ground clucking to her sympathetically, and she didn’t know how to fly. I could almost hear the conversation going on between the two hens:
“What are you doing up there?”
“Well, somehow I got myself into this mess and can’t find a way down.”
“Heh, the answer is obvious. You can see me. Why don’t you just flutter down?”
“It seems the most direct way, but it seems so far and I’m scared of heights.”
“Well, how did you get up there in the first place?”
“I took the stairs that are on the other side of the roof.”
“Just use them again to get back down.”
“But that means you’ll be out of my sight and I’ll be moving away from the direction I want to go!”
“Look, I’m tired of waiting for you.” And the chicken down on the ground starts to walk away.
An even-more panicked first chicken starts shrieking even louder, “Don’t leave me!”
“Well, look for a way down and tell me all about it when you do.”
The first chicken stands frozen on the edge of the roof. It seems like such a long way down. She tentatively walks a little more to the side, but finds the view is just the same. She walks back and forth between three feet of edge. The objective (her friend) is so close and the way is clear, but it looks dangerous. The stairs don’t even cross her mind because that ‘obviously will lead further away.’
Meanwhile I’m standing by the window, and by that time I had called a friend, and the two of us were willing the chicken to either jump, or just start going further than her three feet so she could find the stairs.
But, no, the chicken stood there, crying her woes to the world and was still stuck with her dilemma. She would never find the stairs because that would mean turning her back to the ‘obvious’ solution and her friends. Of course, in her limited brain and sight that would be working against all that she wanted to accomplish. I could almost hear her saying, “Well, I want to go this way. Why on earth would I want to turn my back on it and go in the opposite direction? What good would that accomplish?” without really looking into that possibility.
In the end, that is, after about ten minutes of watching her to see what she would do, she propelled herself off the edge with a pitiful cry and landed on her belly on the sand below. Making sure she had all her body parts still in one piece, she carefully got up and rejoined her friends, but until lunch time you could still hear her telling her tale to the rest of the brood.
As I went about my day, I thought of this chicken. Why didn’t she go over to the stairs that she had climbed up? Why didn’t she think that far? There must have been an easier way than to freefall in thin air to an uncertain landing.
How like that chicken we are sometimes. We can clearly see the goals and objectives that need to be reached. We stand at the starting line ready to take off and go for our goals, but we are a little unsure of the way we’ll go about it. We discuss and try to come up with the right solution and way to go about reaching our goals. But we fail to see that the easiest, safest way to go is another way because it looks like it’ll lead us away from what we want to accomplish. So we don’t take that into consideration at all. “Of course, it’s not the right way. I can’t see how this will possibly propel us towards our goals.”
Sometimes we really are ‘chicken’…