Why did the chicken cross the road?

Newsflash: ‘If you have asked yourself this question, you are procrastinating.’

Stop.
It does not matter why the chicken crossed the road.
The only thing that matters is that it did.
Period.

Whether the chicken crossed the road to get to the other side, to get to a library to find the answer to the ‘chicken and egg’ riddle or to simply poke fun at us while we obsess over why it did for over a 150 years and counting is immaterial.

The fact is that our lives are surrounded by numerous situations similar to the chicken crossing the road. We dwell over these matters a little more than we perhaps should and we spend hours each day if not weeks focusing on problems akin to it.

Very few of us, if any sit and think, ‘So the chicken crossed the road. Great! What should it do next?’

If we think about the situation on a very personal level we find that it does not matter why the chicken decided to cross the road, whether it was a good decision or bad, right or wrong. The reality of the situation is the fact that due to whatever circumstance, favorable or not, whether it wanted to cross the road or not, the chicken is now on the other side of the road.

Also at this point, it does not matter now if it was forced to do it, whether it was a life’s dream being fulfilled, or whether it was due to reasons outsides the chicken’s hands (wings?).

The focus should be on, ‘Now what?’ What happens next?

In our lifetimes we find ourselves often staring back at ourselves.
We think about how we got to be where we presently are. Sometimes these are thoughts of triumph, at other times we are depressed as to how things have turned out so far and yet other times we find ourselves utterly lost and sometimes even staring at a stranger in the mirror.

We often stress ourselves over things that have been done and actions that have been taken. We talk about what could have been or what should have been. We constantly wonder why things are the way they are and how we came to be in situations that we are in and how we could have been in a different situation had things been done differently.

We talk and bitch about the chicken crossing the road by the water cooler or the lunch table, right through our lives - be in school, college or at work. What went wrong, who did what, wondering why we are in the situation we are in.
We procrastinate. And we do it very well.

The problem is we constantly ask the wrong question without being the wiser.
We keep asking, ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’

So while the chicken is busy taking its revenge and laughing itself hoarse at our obsession of it crossing the road it has unwittingly opened the door to something much more that we can take away from here on a philosophical level. It has made us think about the right question to be asked,

‘The chicken is on the other side of the road. What next?’