Sit On Your Egg

I just left a senior colleague's table at the office but my heart is still sitting and my ears are wide open to all he had to say about me, about him, about the future. I feel inspired to write this to encourage someone out there.

There is a mystery that surrounds the egg. This mysterious mystery is not so much a misery, it's simply this: you can't tell what an egg would hatch.

Growing up, my father (Late Pa Micheal Ekundayo) though highly educated, a graduate of the prestigious OAU was fond of farming. We (his children) hated farming; walking down the narrow bush paths in the early morning with the irritating feeling of dew on grass blades scratching at our legs, accompanied by the buzz and comfort of early morning flies - we felt like ripe rotten mangoes. We would sometimes cry and slap at ourselves from the bite of sand flies late into the evenings when we plucked beans with bent backs. There was the melon (Egusi), rotten and smelling in greenish-brown decaying pods which we had to scoop out with our hands - sometimes we wore nylon made hand gloves but I'm yet to know a perfume so strong as the smell that came with it. No matter how much you scrub and bath and spray and breath, you'll still smell of it for a minimum of two to three days. But father didn't care what we thought or how we felt, he would tell us that was what his father brought him up with. He would make us understand that if he looked to inherit anything from his father, it would only be a farm (his father had no bicycle.) He would tell us we shouldn't look forward to inheriting anything from him other than what we earned for ourselves under him.

I grew up with these values and it shaped my thoughts of being a man; i found (and still find it) hard to give my clothes out for washing, to leave dishes unwashed, to be lazy, idle, dirty, untidy or totally dependent on people for my entire well-being. My father was also given to rearing animals, so we went from tying goats in raining seasons, to feeding chickens in all seasons.

So I've been thinking and reconciling facts about the eggs and the hen. I've since observed the hen;

- Back then, some of our hens were so devoted to their eggs that for 21 whole days, you wouldn't see them leave the eggs, they would sit diligently. I recall some nights when we had to get out of bed to watch a fight between some of our hens and snakes. They were usually fierce fights that ended with the snakes escaping but left the brave chicken with a bite and death on or before morning. They were so willing to fight and die for their eggs.

- There are certain times (particularly during the peak of the Babangida era and Abacha) that we largely ate eggs from our hen, as meat was costly. At that time, we removed the eggs some of our hens laid and made a meal of it. However the situation, I noticed some of these hens would passionately sit on the spot where these eggs were laid, until we drove them away repeatedly. They didn't care if we ate their eggs, they were willing to mate and lay again. They were 'dogs' - so dogged.

- There were countless times we had to throw rotten eggs away - eggs that didn't hatch after the incubation period - they smell the worse.There is no guarantee that every egg would hatch, yet the hen is willing to sit on it. This uncertainty didn't stop the hen, it was always determined that even if it would hatch a chick out of ten eggs, it was worth the wait and the raise.

Enough said of the many animal lessons. Now to you and to me, how willing are you and I to sit on our dreams. How dogged are we to fight and if necessary 'die' for them. Every dream, like the egg, comes with a lot of uncertainty, we can't if they would hatch, if the chicks would grow into chickens or die as chicks, we can't tell if they would be hens or cocks... but are we willing like the hen to incubate, hatch and raise our eggs? One key note is this - whatever comes out of an egg, no matter how small, no matter how fragile... is always bigger and better than the egg, even if it fails or get carried away by the hawk, it was always worth the wait and the try.

I'm urging you today, Sit on your Egg, incubate that Egg, Hatch that Chick and Raise that Chicken. The world is waiting but it's all under your choice to brood or live and walk the earth as a god who died a mortal.

Melchizedek, son of Michael. [2/9/2016] photo credit: wisegeek dot org