Susan Cherie Beam

Yesterday, I was talking with a friend about how incredibly powerful our minds are. Think about it – one day, I may be grouchy and everything sucks, but the day before, everything was amazing and I was grateful for my life. Nothing has changed on the outside – the only thing that’s changed is the lens with which I am seeing it.

During the conversation with my friend, we referenced the old fable of the eagle who thought they were the chicken. It was a story that was important to me early in sobriety – I was introduced to it in a book by spiritual teacher Anthony De Mello, which is what I’m going to use as my reference, because despite my best attempts, I’m unable to trance it to any other source.

The story goes as follows: a farmer found an eagle’s egg and stuck it in his chicken coop. There, the egg hatched, and Little Eagle grew up enjoying life scratching around the barnyard with their other chicken friends. One day, Little Eagle looked to the sky and saw another eagle soaring above.

“What’s that?” they inquired of Friend Chicken.

Friend Chicken looked up. “Oh, that’s an eagle. They are birds of the sky. They soar and swoop. We are birds of the earth. We scratch in the dirt.”

Little Eagle nodded, having learned something for the day, then went back to poking at the dirt. Ultimately, Little Eagle lived their entire life as a chicken, because that is what Little Eagle believed in their mind.

To me, this fable resonated so deeply because so often, I have remained a prisoner of my own (usually negative) beliefs and ideas. I limit myself by telling myself I can’t do something…it’s too hard…my work isn’t good enough…I’m not good enough. Over and over again, I buy into the biggest lie of them all: this isn’t worth doing unless I can be amazing at it. It’s like I instantly forget that the journey is a part of the destination.

A possible relation – I just finished reading Lori Gottlieb’s  Maybe You Should Talk to Someone (2019). Without discussing both the merits of the book (Gottlieb’s is a compelling storyteller) and the criticisms I’ve seen but can’t really comment on from lack of expertise (mostly about how it represents therapy), there was a powerful image included: a prisoner, desperately holding onto the bars of their cage (less impactful when you’ve been in jail and know that most jails have doors to the cells, but go off), not realizing that to the right and left of the bars is empty space…freedom is available, if only you let go of what’s keeping you locked inside. In other words, everything I experience passes through the powerful filter of my internal space. If I’m negative, I’ll find fault. If I’m positive, I’ll find joy.

This isn’t easy though – and I personally despise toxic positivity. I do think: it’s completely OK, even commendable, to take this with a large grain of salt. Last June, in the midst of a job change and losing my father within the same 72 hour period, my filter was smashed. I was raw-dogging every moment, just trying not to lose my shit. And that was OK for then. Maybe the most productive reasoning is – the majority of the time, I can choose my perspective, and during the hard times of life, the best perspective I get to choose is: this hurts but I can do this.

At least that’s slightly beyond the dirt of the barnyard.