When stories become reality

Each week, I look forward to James Clear’s 3-2-1 emails that come out on Thursdays.  They include 3 ideas, 2 quotes, and 1 question to consider, and almost every week, something in the email gives me pause.  This past week had a quote, though more like a story, that sent me into a cycle of reflection that I’m still working through.  I offer it here today so that you, too, may reflect and see what arises.

From James Clear’s email on 7/15/21:

A parable from priest and therapist Anthony de Mello on the stories we tell ourselves:

"A man found an eagle's egg and put it in a nest of a barnyard hen.  The eaglet hatched with the brood of chickens and grew up with them.

All his life, the eagle did what the barnyard chicks did, thinking he was a barnyard chicken.  He scratched the earth for worms and insects.  He clucked and cackled.  And he would thrash his wings and fly a few feet into the air.

Years passed and the eagle grew very old.  One day he saw a magnificent bird above him in the cloudless sky.  It glided in graceful majesty among the powerful wind currents, with scarcely a beat of its strong golden wings.

The old eagle looked up in awe.  ‘Who's that?’ he asked.

‘That's the eagle, the king of the birds,’ said his neighbor.  ‘He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth—we're chickens.’

So the eagle lived and died a chicken, for that's what he thought he was."

Source: Song of the Bird

This short parable is a little hard to take in, with its bent toward resignation and finality of having lived an unexamined and unquestioned life.  But usually the questions that push us to a new place are the ones that first appear hardest to be with.  These are the questions I’ve been contemplating:

• What are you assuming is true without question?

• What beautiful life are you assuming is out of your reach?

What do you discover about yourself or your life when you consider these?

A good place to contemplate [Cliffs of Moher, Ireland]

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