Chicken Licken

As Chicken-Licken went one day to the woods, an acorn fell upon her poor bald pate, and she thought the sky had fallen. Then she said she would go and tell the king ...

Accordingly she went on her way, spreading the news and telling everybody — Henny-Penny, Cocky-Locky, Ducky-Lucky etc etc, gathering them all in her wake as she communicated the urgency of the situation, until she made her big mistake in telling Foxy-Loxy, who offered to show her the way to the king's abode.

Foxy-Loxy said, "Come along with me, and I will show you the way." But Foxy-Loxy took them into the fox's hole, and he and his young ones soon ate up Chicken-Licken, Henny-Penny, Cocky-Locky, Ducky-Lucky, Drakey-Lakey, Goosey-Loosey, Gander-Lander and Turkey-Lurkey; and they never saw the king to tell him the sky had fallen!

These old stories, they always had a moral, didn't they?

What's this one?

I cannot now track down the author but I read somewhere — which made me smile — that about 90% of the things we worry about never happen and about 90% of the things that happen took us by surprise when we weren't worried about them at all; so we're worrying about the right amount but about the wrong things. 

🤣

Yep.

Or I guess Chicken-Licken's story may tip us off that getting all worked up about something small, swelling it into something massive and alarming, so absorbs our focus that we are entirely distracted from reality and aren't paying attention when a real problem taps us on the shoulder.

Something like that.

There's also this cartoon that always makes me laugh — I'd post it here but in these days when AI enables entire industries to source their income by scanning the interwebs on the lookout for copyright infringements, perhaps I'd better not.

I don't know if you've noticed, but the world seems to be in a bit of a mess.

So very much of a mess, in fact, that I find it tends to loom extremely large in my everyday thoughts.

I think about the assaults of an intimate nature on young girls by gangs of men, about stabbings and fly-tipping and homelessness, and the tidal wave of chronic sickness and turbo-cancers and all the rest of it set in motion in 2021, and about the extraordinary increase in Parkinsons disease, and the predictions for our future of Geert Vanden Bossche. I think of our country's economic blunders and the truly dreadful implications of political decisions, and about the threat of digital ID hanging over our head like Damocles' sword. I think about our food security imperilled by inadvisable punitive tax measures imposed on our farmers, and about people sent to prison for years because of an imprudent text. I think of deceit by those we entrusted with the leadership of our country, about the politicisation of our police force and the proposal that jury trials be widely abolished. I think about how much it will cost in both money and water to put our public infrastructure into the hands of robots. I read about incels and hikikomori, and about the wandering tribes of people made homeless in India and China because cyber-crime or glitches in the system locked them out of their bank accounts in a cashless society. I see clickbait headlines telling us World War 3 is threatening. I listen to the account of the Jewish hostages released from their captivity in Gaza, and try to take in everything they endured and how long it went on. I think of men coming across the sea in their thousands in search of a better life in England, blithely unaware that we are running out of the money we need for their upkeep (and with it the goodwill). I think of the cows — and ruminants are basically digestive systems on four legs — made to eat the Bovaer chemicals to disrupt their alimentary processes. I think of governments planning to try and dim the sun, spraying chemtrails with aluminium that is toxic to all life, and about the ubiquity of glyphosate poisoning, and the suppression of medical trial data in the interest of financial investors. I think about all of this and so much more. 

And I feel as though the sky is falling on our heads.

I suppose if you're as small as Chicken-Licken, an acorn is very big.

But there is this hope — there comes a point when doom threatens so large and loud, and from so many different sides, that there is simply too much to worry about.

There is nothing for it then but to open the curtains and make the bed and clean my teeth and put the laundry out to dry and feed the cat and kiss my husband and choose food that will truly nutrify me and write a thousand words of another novel and send my children some Christmas money and put tinned food in the Foodbank box and take some time to pray and some time to rejoice when the sun shines.

If I do all those simple, ordinary things, then when doom catches up with me I shall at least have lived. After all, if I spend my days transfixed with worry and it turns out that what I thought was the sky falling was actually only an acorn when it comes to it — well, that would have been a waste of a life, would it not?

So I will make the best choices I can with the information and resources available to me, and I will give thanks for our lovely house and its garden, for the quiet neighbourhood where I live, and for the chance to be here in this world where there is kindness and laughter and birdsong and sunrises and crocuses in the spring. I will hold these things in my heart, not for myself only but also for those who are locked in prison cells or held hostage or trapped in hells they cannot escape. So far as within me lies, I will tend and protect the sweet ordinary of simple human life, so that it may always be there for whoever needs its solace and its hope.

I will walk away from the falling acorns and be careful not to discuss them very much. And I will be cautious of those who proclaim themselves able to whisk me into the presence of the king. Not everyone with amber eyes and pointy noses and whiskers is entirely to be trusted.