Chicken Licken Revisited
A few years ago, I came across these words of Einstein’s…
If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales.
If you want your children to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.- Einstein
I’ve always been an avid, bring-on-all-the-accents, reader of a range of stories to my children, and fairy tales have featured, but I couldn’t quite work out why a fairy tale would impact intelligence.
This week, however, my little boy who generally prefers to wind down for the evening with books about expletives, extinct creatures and… the expletives of extinct creatures, surprised me by asking me to read Chicken Licken (others may know other versions of the story as Chicken Little or Henny Penny).
Intrigued as to why this book was being put in front of me, I began…
Once upon a time, there was a little chicken called Chicken Licken. One day an acorn fell from a tree and hit Chicken Licken on the head. Chicken Licken thought the sky was falling down. So off he ran to tell the King…
And just like that the light bulb switched on. I always understood the story as being a timeless tale about false alarms and the potential-deadly danger of blind following, but sometimes timing is everything and a story becomes more meaningful when read with new eyes.
Another moral of the story is, apparently: To have courage even when it feels like the sky is falling down.
We are, arguably, in the midst of the greatest rendition of Chicken Little of our time. Chicken Little isn’t so little, and Chicken Little has an entire corporate and social media team broadcasting his story round the clock. To be fair, Chicken Little isn’t entirely wrong. Something landed on/in his/her/their/its head. Things like acorns do indeed land on heads from time to time. Not everyone’s, but some.
For many, the proverbial acorn is a pandemic like no other, and the sky falling an impending apocalypse. The result has been what is in fact called Chicken Little Syndrome: “Inferring catastrophic conclusions possibly resulting in paralysis". It has also been defined as "a sense of despair or passivity which blocks the audience from actions".
If one follows the biblical definition of apocalypse - “The complete final destruction of the world” - this would indeed be an immensely terrorising, I mean terrifying, notion.
Sometimes, however, as Einstein recommended, it pays perhaps to source one’s information a little more widely.
The Ancient Greek meaning of apocalypse is rather more enlightening. Apokalypsis (Apo meaning “of/from” and Kalypsis meaning “from cover”) means “a disclosure or revelation of great Knowledge”, to “take the cover off".
As a birth worker, the latter resonates more. It speaks to birth and rebirth. It speaks to that emergence from the womb or cocoon and the veil essentially lifting. What looks like an ending is nothing more than another beginning. Our desire to control it, hype up the fear, manipulate it and control other’s experience of it, is where the danger and essentially the death of self lies.
Imagine if Cocky Locky, Ducky Lucky or Turkey Lurkey had said: “Are you sure?” “Perhaps it’s something else?” “Let’s look at the bigger picture here”. What would have happened to them? What would the king have actually done upon hearing of an impending sky fall? If an acorn had been found to be the source of the drama, what would the fate of Oak trees have been?
Perhaps I’m asking silly questions here. But, bare with me while I consider the words of that batty old theorist Einstein again:
The important thing is to not stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.
The big question really is: If the world was “ending”; if we were on the brink of witnessing a champagne supernova in the sky, would we want to panic like chickens without heads outsourcing our data, or would we want to get really intimate with our own hearts and our fears (ask ourselves what’s really behind those fears), and bring ourselves back to courage and aligned action?
And as for Foxy Loxy? Well, if they’d never arrived at his den, he may have had to dash out to find a Gingerbread boy to “help” across a river.
But that’s enough stories for one night. See you in the morning.