This morning I took my wife to work with her bike in the trunk of the car. It’s a clear cool day with no wind. On a day like this she loves to ride home on her bicycle. It’s great exercise and she relaxes in the calmness of the experience. The duck and chicken farm she works part time at is only 7 minutes away by car so she can make it home by bike in less than fifteen.
When we got there I unloaded her bike and put it up by the door to the work area that is called the egg room. That’s where she collects the fresh duck eggs from a conveyor belt that slides through the nesting area inside the barn. After she does that she has to go into the barn itself and check for any ducks that may have collapsed and died overnight.
In the duck, as in the chicken growing business, there’s a certain rate of fatality built into the operation. As the ducks grow bigger it’s percentage gets smaller. About 2% I’d say in this case. That may not sound like a lot but when you have a barn with a flock of hundreds of birds it can add up to a large smelly pile in a short time.
These ducks are now bigger at between three or four pounds each. As she takes out the dead ones she piles them in the corner of the room close to the door to the outside. Usually another worker, who operates the various motorized farm equipment, will take those ducks and load them into the bucket of the skid-steer and then bury them in the manure pile where their bodies soon turn into usable compost.
But because it’s Saturday it’s his day off, so the bird’s increasingly smelly and decaying carcasses are still in the corner of the room. Odor is an excepted factor in farming and she’s become used to it. She doesn’t have that big a problem with it.
I was raised in the city so I do.
Since I am experienced in driving these machines I started the skid steer and moved it to the door. She quickly threw in the dead bodies and I went off and buried them with one quick scoop of manure on top. It didn’t take long and the benefit is that she has a work environment that’s a bit more nostril friendly.
This post isn’t about farming though. It just jostled in my brain that things like what happens in that duck barn often happen in our own heads too.
Thoughts are things. And old ones that relate to smelly things that might have happened to us in the past can fester in the present.
I refer to this process as ”H.O.” – History Opens. If that’s where you spend a lot of time be careful you don’t leave a big pile of rotting ducks in there. Past history is really great but only if you’re examining the source motivations that caused success not failure history.
That’s only half of an acronym that I use for explaining mindset immunity. Which, by the way, I’m convinced is the ultimate buffer for smelly motivations that arise off of rotting old thoughts that haven’t been cleared out in time.
Care to know what the other half is? Your very welcome.
It’s “P.E.” which means: Perception Expands.
If you’re looking at something that is always active and doing something then your perception always expands. Expands your options, your capabilities, and your vision for the future not to mention your value to yourself and to the world.
Oh. In case you didn’t put the whole acronym together yet let me help you. It spells H.O.P.E.
Could you use more of it?