the mean chicken🐔 and the moon🌙

We are always at the mercy of our smaller pieces. 

For nearly 2 million years competitive, little pecking beasts have found refuge inside our divided brain. It’s part of our being apex predators over earth’s domain. 

We humans are wired to assess, categorize, and compete which has served us well… until it hasn’t.

Neurologists describe our brain’s balance of two modes as the left seeking to analyze, control, and solve and the right seeking to understand through relationship, context, and meaning.

Clearly the former is dominating given today’s “win or lose”, self-involved, less connected mindset. The “mean chicken” has been winning.

But every so often, something like Artemis II interrupts this thinking which reminds us of what it means to participate in something that cannot be reduced to individual gain.
 
No one goes to the moon alone. Such an achievement is the result of cooperation, trust, and a shared belief in something greater than oneself.

Awe is a human necessity. It is the feeling we encounter when faced with something vast like the view of the earth rise over the moon, a moment of human excellence. 

It loosens our individual focus, expands curiosity in its place and causes us to see that we are all part of something larger. 

Awe doesn’t happen to one of us—it happens to all of us.

What we give our attention to shapes who we become.

A steady diet of competition/comparison and seeing the world in problem/solution binaries makes us forget that we live in a complex universe of complex systems that cannot be reduced so easily to winner/loser terms.

Care is cooperative. It resists the urge to dominate and instead chooses to nurture.

The moon reminds us of who we’ve always been: creatures drawn to wonder, capable of collaboration and connection.

We may never fully rid ourselves of the “mean chicken,” but we can choose what we reward.

So let’s not reward the number of eggs, but give our attention and praise to the conditions in which the eggs are laid.

We are better than we think. And the Artemis II trip around the moon reminds us to act like it.