Chicken Little

Sometimes a proverbial acorn falls on my head.

Like a character from the classic children's story of Chicken Little, I conclude with sudden certainty that the sky is falling.  In the story, Chicken Little runs to the next farm animal in a flurry of drama to exclaim his distress. Henny Penny picks up the refrain until a whole troupe of animals is running around in a senseless panic until they run right into the jaws of an accommodating fox.  A serious emergency results, I'm sure.

So that was me-- in Chicken Little mode tonight.  Something small (in the relative scheme of things) upset my equilibrium, and I couldn't just pause and look up and assess that I was indeed standing under a tree kinda laden with "acorns" of mini-series drama.  We're not talking drama on a worldwide-epic-scale here, just enough to give me a clonk on the head.

And like Chicken Little, I had to get on the phone and exclaim my distress about my falling sky.

I'm so lucky that my Henny Penny essentially said,  "You know what?  You just need to stop standing under that tree.  Cuz' whether the acorns fall or don't fall, you don't need to be standing there."

Sure, she let me chatter on a bit about how it felt to have a falling-sky kind of day.  She didn't scold when I went completely tangential about an unrelated storm I saw on the horizon.  She didn't try to tell me that the acorn didn't hurt or that it would never happen again.

But sometimes my frantic Chicken Little self just needs a calm voice saying, "Get out from under that tree, silly.  Just as acorns fall from Oak trees, Drama comes when you own other people's business."

The sky really can come crashing down on us.  Our whole world can fall apart in the blink of an eye with one unexpected phone call.

But if yours isn't, I hope when you run to Henny Penny, she won't put you on a conference call with Goosey Loosey.

Let the acorns fall where they may.  Let's be scanning the sky for rainbows.