An Optimistic Egg
(This is a real life incident that happened almost few years back. I was postponing putting it on paper, but the story was refusing to go out of my mind. So here is short account of what happened and the way I saw it. It may look very off-beat but this is how it is.)
One day I bought a dozen eggs from the market. As I emptied them in the refrigerator’s egg compartment, I found out that one of them was of somewhat different color. Normally eggs are white but among them sat one egg which was light brown in color. If you have seen, duck eggs are brown in color but here all were chicken eggs. It would have been better if I had just made an omlet out of it and finished the case then and there. But I thought of leaving that egg as it is and see what would happen.
As days passed, one by one eggs were consumed by someone or the other but that one light brown egg kept surviving. May be a different color gave it an added advantage of not getting selected for consumption by anyone. But my curiosity was about its different color? One explanation that I had was that it wanted to be different from the rest and that’s why it decided to be like that. On the way to store or in the farm itself it might have learned that duck eggs have twice the nutritional value and it hoped that change of color would make it better than the rest.
Because what that egg must have seen was just the outer appearance. May be it simply not liked being an average egg. It wanted to improvise on itself and stand different from other chicken eggs & hence made an attempt to be like duck egg. May be in the world of eggs, success is measured by amount of nutritional value it has. And this particular egg wanted to improve on something. But it could not have done on parameter of nutrition as that was an inner quality & hence difficult to develop, so it thought of bringing change in terms of outer appearance. A slightly different color would mean a better image in front of others or as someone who stood out of the crowd and did something different.
But does that change the reality? Will it make chicken egg equivalent to a duck egg? I think it won’t. For a moment, if one considers the way it looks, it may be said so but in reality it will remain the same. It is not how an egg looks but what it is made up of which is important. That is what is important and that is what matters. In another way it can be said that the character of the egg was more important than how it looked. The attempt of light brown egg to be like duck egg just because it wanted to stand out of the crowd was not a wise attempt. The change was only in appearance and no actual difference was made in the qualities of egg. It already lost its uniqueness of being white and did not gain anything by change in outer appearance. The change which might be appearing to be proud of to the light brown egg was just its ego making it so. In reality it was still the same. Nothing changed for real. Just the appearance changed and the ego made the egg feel that it is special now that it is slightly different. May be the egg was unaware of the fact that the color was just an illusory parameter and the real quality was the content with which an egg is made of. Real quality was what made its character and that was its contents with which it was made of.
I think it slowly started becoming aware of truth. After few days, I noticed that the color of the egg had moved from light brown towards lighter brown. May be it came to know that there was nothing more important than preserving one’s own uniqueness that Mother Nature had bestowed upon it. There is no use running behind things that won’t do anything good to the world or even us except that it may look good. It is always better for oneself and everyone to just be what they are and keep doing what they love to do and be how they want to be. Any attempt to be different than the rest which overshadows one’s uniqueness is an unwise step in wrong direction. The egg learned to honor its uniqueness and stopped making a foolish attempt to blindly imitate others. It surely became more optimistic about its own qualities and uniqueness that Nature bestowed on it. I am sure we humans can learn something from this.
The egg could not turn white completely as it was consumed few days later. It surely wasted time by running behind illusions of the world and must have regretted it at its end. But death knows no rules. It has to come and will come. Sooner or later, but surely one day it will come. It came to that egg!
Just remember this, be yourself and be optimistic about your positive qualities and potential and keep improving upon them. Be in the present moment and keep following your heart and intuition. Rest will be taken care of. And if you really want to change, change from inside.
I first published this article on Medium
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