When someone mentions an eagle, what do you think of in your mind?
Many people imagine a big bird, flying high up in the air, with its wings spread out, moving around gracefully with so little effort. The eagle has very sharp eyes which can see a long distance. When it sees a meal, like a rabbit on the ground, it can come down very fast and grab the animal with its sharp claws. The eagle is called the king of the birds. It has great strength, super vision and really strong claws.
A story is told of a man who found an eagle’s egg. He put it with his chickens and the mother hens. Soon the egg hatched. The young eagle grew up with all the other chickens. Whatever the chickens did, the eagle also did. He thought he was a chicken, just like them. Since the chickens could only fly for a short distance, the eagle also learnt to fly a short distance. He thought that was what he was supposed to do. So that was all that he thought he could do. And that was all he was able to do.
One day the eagle saw a bird flying high above him. He was very impressed. “Who is that?” he asked the hens around him.
“That’s the eagle, the king of the birds,” the hens told him. “He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth — we are chickens.
The eagle was faced with a challenge: live and die as a chicken, for that's all he'd ever known; or take a risk and go beyond his self-understanding.
Are you an eagle or a chicken?