Stone Paradox

Once upon a time, a chicken had five eggs; or, so she thought. This was her first lay. If she knew it would accelerate the incubation, she would roll the eggs faster under her belly. She would even roll the earth, if she could, so that the days would pass faster.

She was even planning ahead for her little ones, and was anxious to see them grow. Aside from the usual tasks, what could she do to see their flourishing in life? Perhaps, she should bring the earth closer to the sun so that the seasons would pass quicker, and her chicks would grow sooner to become grown-ups.

But unfortunately, the reality was that she had to wait; and then? Wait again!... One more day... One more... One more...

“Did you hear that?” asked the mother chicken, one day, curiously to her friend sitting beside her. 

“Hear what?” her friend replied reluctantly, and added “You are going to become nuts! Just calm down! They are going to come whenever time is mature for them.” These words were coming from an experienced chicken who had sat for incubation several times, and who had the wisdom of ages. The mother chicken had no choice but to keep sitting.

Her curiosity and her excitement, however, could not sit. Her heart was beating strong, as if knocking on the eggs, and trying to hear a response. She was singing, at times, loudly, in an urge to perform an ultrasound on her eggs; but this was not going on for too long, since she was disturbing the others around.

One day, her old friend told: “When you have this much anticipation, an unusually long waiting time puts you in frustration. You lose your hopes quickly, and give up on your eggs. You need to do other things to distract yourself. Otherwise, you are going to destruct yourself.”

In fact, that was exactly what was going on in her heart those days. She was starting to think that her chicks were not coming, given the unusually long waiting time she had to endure. Was her friend just being optimistic, or was she talking the reality? Was it going to be worth the waiting for that long, if the eggs turn out to be dead? “Don’t you think that they should have already come out?” she asked desperately, one day.

“Why should they? They are in their cozy eggs. No toil for food or water, no worries about predators. Would you come out, if you were them?”

“I am not joking! This is serious!”

“Look honey! You are going to laugh at yourself when they come. You just need to wait until they decide to come. You are not the first one to have chicks.”

After a few days of further waiting, the mother chicken felt an unexpected knock under her belly. Then it felt like someone was pinching her from below. The next moment, she was fully airborne, flipping her wings in joy. “They are coming, they are coming,” she exclaimed. When she came to her senses, she was a mother of four. Four?

“What’s up with the fifth one?” she asked, half engulfed in hope and half in fear of a loss. “Honey, you must wait for it. It is too early to think otherwise,” her friend consoled. But deep inside, the mother knew it: it was a hopeless wait.

The next few days, as she watched her four chicks start to run around, her worries about the fifth one increased. There was no sign of life coming from it. At last, there was a consensus among the ladies that it was a loss. The next thing to do was to find a suitable spot to bury the egg.

The grown-ups lost in their thoughts about the unlucky little one, what could be a better opportunity for an egg-hungry raven? The black predator had been waiting around for the past few minutes to see if she would have a chance of getting that egg. Before anyone heard the whiz of her wings, she was already soaring towards the white globe.

The raven threw a peg, but it gave her a shock. She could not punch a hole. She tried once more stronger. This time, a thin shell chipped off. But, to the raven’s surprise, inside did not look like an egg. It was all white inside. It was a stone! The raven quickly flew off.

As the chickens returned, they saw the lonely egg and the raven flying away. They did not want to complete the rest of the story in their minds. They just rushed towards the egg to see what was left of it. To their surprise, the egg was intact. Just a few cracks and a chip off. Through that small opening, they could see what was beneath the shell: another shell. It was not an egg. It was an egg-shaped stone! With her frustration, the mother chicken gave the stone a good kick, with which it rolled out of the nest and started to accelerate downhill. As the chickens looked behind the rolling stone and as the little four chicks ran after it, one of the chickens said “I had already felt something strange about it, but I didn’t tell; you know”, upon which the mother chicken gave another kick to the owner of these words. The wise chicken threw her spear-gazes around to suppress any reaction. After all, this was a sensitive moment.

“How did it come there”, the mother chicken wondered.

“I don’t know honey.”

“An object that looks like an egg, that weighs like an egg, and that arrives with the other eggs... I don’t see all of these happening at once coincidentally.”

Upon the puzzlement of her friend, the wise chicken said: “Life itself is a puzzle, honey. Look at us. Who would guess that a soft creature with hundreds of feathers is growing in a single-piece, rigid body? Who would say that a brown object with flesh and bone would come out of a white ball? We see the same puzzle over and over before our eyes, and we think that we solved it by naming it.”

Meaningful as it was, the wise chicken’s explanation did not remove the mother chicken’s confusion. Instead of wasting more time on this issue, she wanted to make up for what she could not do in past few days as a mother.

The mother chicken decided to take a walk with her little ones, and so, she stepped towards where her four chicks had gone. Down the hill, she saw them playing with the remains of that stone, which had at last broken into pieces hitting fast onto a rock. As she approached them, she saw better what was inside the stone: her fifth one!

The poor chick was trying to wake up from her turbulent journey downhill as the siblings removed the debris around her. The mother chicken cackled as loudly as never before. Soon, everybody was piled around them, first in silence, then in a growing whisper: “is that a shell or a wall?”, “I wouldn’t like to have come in it.”, “no wonder the raven gave up on her”, “I’ve never seen or heard anything like it”. The wise chicken uttered the words that silenced everyone:

“Life is a puzzle. Is it that the shell was so thick because it was going to be attacked by a raven, or is it that the raven attacked this egg since the chick was not strong enough to break its shell?”