Pecking or Soaring

🐓🕊️ On attention, courage, and choosing the signals that carry us forward

We call ourselves ‘headless chickens’ when life feels like a sprint with no finish line. We say we ‘chicken out’ when fear overtakes courage and we abandon something tender before it can grow. But there is another way we behave like chickens too. In how we consume content.

Peck. Peck. Peck. A headline here. A meme there. A half truth wrapped in outrage, or optimism without roots. We skim the surface of everything and sink into nothing. Our attention fractures. Our energy thins. Our imagination starves.

There is a famous fable called Morir en la pavada by Mamerto Menapace. The title alone already says so much: to die in triviality, to waste a life on nonsense. The literal translation is “To die in the rafter”. A rafter is a group of turkeys. Imagine the sound of that for a moment: all those turkeys and their gobble, gobble, gobble. If we could put a sound to our social media feeds, that would be it…

Dying in Triviality, an ode to Mamerto Menapace

To be always on the run
without knowing from what or why,
spending life on empty noise,
losing oneself in foolishness.

Talking without saying anything,
listening without really hearing,
believing you are living fully
while time slips through your hands.

And one day waking up tired,
with no memory of having chosen,
realizing too late
that you died in triviality.

Menapace’s fable is devastating. And liberating. Because it names what many of us feel, holding a mirror to our reality. (I’ve translated it and if you’re into fables, you can read it at the foot of this article.)

This fable reflects a conundrum that is as old as humanity but which has been accelerated by digital technologies and AI. We are exhausted not because life is too full, but because it is too scattered. We are informed, but not nourished. Stimulated, but not moved.

So the question becomes: how do we transform ourselves? How do we transcend this chicken behavior and rise into flight, like condors?

Not by consuming better noise. But by listening inward for the signals.

Photo: Jean Vella for Unsplash

Real transformation does not require more inputs. It requires better discernment. By learning to sense what actually matters to us, before we let the world tell us what should.

Discernment is a practice. A daily tuning of attention toward what expands us rather than drains us. Toward what invites depth instead of speed and what opens futures rather than loop us into reaction.

Signals rarely arrive as breaking news. They arrive as quiet recognitions. A sentence that stays with you. A conversation that shifts your breath. A story that makes you feel more yourself, not less. These are not loud. They are resonant.

To detect them, we need to cultivate inner signal over outer noise. That means trusting your own nervous system as a compass. Noticing when something contracts you, and when something widens your field of possibility. Asking not, “Is this trending?” but, “Is this true for me?” Sensing what it is that makes you care, what calls to you in the midst of so much noise.

The world does not need smoother versions of us. It needs stranger ones. Quirkier ones. Our awkwardness is not a flaw. It is a feature of aliveness. Blending into the rafter of turkeys makes us less unique, less human and less connected.

When we embrace our true selves, not the optimized selves but the honest ones, something shifts. We stop pecking at fragments and start feeding on meaning. We stop scrambling and start choosing. We stop dying in triviality and start living in alignment.

Transformation, then, is not about becoming better chickens. It is about remembering that we were meant to soar.

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Dying in Triviality -by Mamerto Menapace, published in Cuentos Rodados, Editorial Patria Grande

Once a man from Catamarca, who was crossing the mountains, found among the rocks of the peaks a strange egg. It was too large to be a chicken’s. Besides, it would have been difficult for such an animal to reach that place to lay it. And it was too small to be an ostrich’s.

Not knowing what it was, he decided to take it with him. When he got home, he handed it to his wife, who happened to have a turkey hen brooding a clutch of newly laid eggs. Seeing that it was more or less the same size as the others, she went and placed this one too under the brooding turkey.

By coincidence, when the turkey poults began to break their shells, so did the chick that was incubating in the egg brought from the peaks. And although it turned out to be a little animal not entirely the same, it did not stand out too much from the rest of the brood. And yet it was a condor chick. Yes indeed, a condor, just as you hear. Although it had been born under the warmth of the brooding turkey, its life came from another source.

Since it had no place to learn anything else, the little creature imitated what it saw being done. It peeped like the other turkey poults and followed the big turkey in search of little worms, seeds, and scraps. It scratched the earth, and hopping tried to pluck ripe little fruits from the tuitá bush. It lived in the henhouse and was afraid of the shaggy mutts that often came to dispute what the mistress threw into the backyard after meals. At night it climbed onto the branches of the carob tree for fear of weasels and other vermin. It lived completely in triviality, doing what it saw the others doing.

At times it felt a little strange, especially when it had the chance to be alone. But it was not common for them to leave it alone. The turkey cannot stand solitude, nor tolerate that others devote themselves to it. It is an animal that always moves in flocks, puffing out its chest to impress, spreading its tail and dragging its wing. Anything that impresses them is immediately answered with loud mockery. Something very typical of these big birds, which despite being large, do not fly.

One midday, with a clear sky and white clouds high in the heights, our little animal was astonished to see some strange birds gliding majestically, almost without moving their wings. It felt something like a jolt deep within its being. Something like an old call that wanted to awaken it in the innermost fibers of its being. Its eyes, accustomed to always looking at the ground in search of food, could not make out what was happening in the heights. But its heart awoke to a powerful longing. And why wasn’t it flying like that? Its heart beat fast, hurried and anxious.

But at that moment a turkey hen came up to it asking what it was doing. She laughed at it when she heard its confidence. She told it that it was a romantic and that it should stop being silly. They were into something else. It had to be realistic and go with her to a place where she had found lots of ripe little fruits and all kinds of worms.

Disoriented, the poor little animal let itself be pulled out of its spell and followed its companion, who brought it back to triviality. It resumed its normal life, always tormented by a deep inner dissatisfaction that made it feel strange.

It never discovered its true identity as a condor. And when it grew old, one day it died. Yes, sadly, it died in triviality as it had lived.
And to think it had been born for the peaks!