Being outmaneuvered by a chick humbled me. My task on the farm was relatively simple: keeping a group of cooped up chicks fed and hydrated. I had just discovered a secret, more difficult task. Keeping them contained.

One morning, with my mind still assembling itself from sleep, I trudged out into the foggy air. As I lifted the gate off the enclosure, I saw that it had not fully done its job of enclosing: two chicks were just outside of it. I kept to my first task and tended to the enclosed chicks’ diets. I hoped the appeal of food would entice the escaped chicks inside. This turned out not to be necessary. They were totally aligned with me on returning to the other side. They were noisily running in circles around the coop trying to get in, squawking at the chicks inside.

The chicks had somehow escaped from under the coop, but the only way back in was from above. So I grabbed a net to try to wrangle them. We danced around the enclosure for a while. Whichever side of the enclosure I went toward, they chose the opposite. Luckily, they were content with this game of ring around the rosy, so our dancefloor remained around the cage.

The voice of Werner Herzog from this video was playing over and over in my head. He describes the “enormity of the stupidity” of chickens and how easy they are to hypnotize. So I was stuck on being outmaneuvered by these seemingly simple creatures. I came up with a strategy to stop them. The enclosure abutted a wall and unfortunately there was a more than chick-sized gap between the wall and the coop that they kept retreating into. If I went to one side of it, they would pop out the other. So I built a barrier to try to put an end to our dancing and create a dead end. I shouldn’t have underestimated their skills or their stupidity: they used their minimal flying ability to enmesh themselves in my barrier, nearly getting fully ensnared in the process. I had to very gently move the barrier – just for them to escape out the other side again.

The frustration mounted as we kept on dancing. I tried another trick, leaving a bit of food outside, hoping it would distract them from my lumbering presence. No luck. They were creatures of pure reactivity.

I stopped trying to outsmart them; it was fruitless and testing my patience. Instead, I focused on a more intentional physical approach. With enough slow movement followed by a quick swoop of the net, I was able to snag one. I lifted the ensnared chick very gently, not wanting to injure it or cause it stress. This was a mistake. As soon as I lifted the net, the chick flew out. It pressed reset on our game and I was back on the chase.

I just needed the right, decisive action, and it took me some practice. A few more trips around the coop and I finally got the first one, using more force this time. The chick definitely didn’t love the net and I needed to use my hands more intentionally to get it back home. The second followed shortly after. Once they were inside, they happily joined their kin. They blended in totally, no sign of stress or discomfort that I could see.



One of the teachings of the Buddha is in “Right Effort” – practicing and living in a way that finds the balance between over-exertion and over-relaxation. This can show up in all kinds of ways.

Mentally, I started off from a single-minded, unskillful place. Werner Herzog’s firm German voice repeating the “enormity of stupidity” of chickens was doing me no favors. I was overthinking the fact that I should be able to outsmart the chick and not focusing on the task at hand. I was putting too much effort into thinking about the problem rather than solving it. For this simple task, more mental effort (and finding the perfect trap) wasn’t necessary. All that was needed was the proper physical effort. And that also took finding the right balance. Initially I was too focused on being gentle and trying to hold the chicks overly delicately. This only made them more anxious and eager to escape. Being firm and holding them such that they felt enclosed (without being too tight) both allowed them to relax and me to complete the task.

Paying attention can reveal whether or not I am applying the proper effort to a task. It can be most obvious in meditation, where the mind is allowed to be quieter. There is no concrete task to achieve, so it’s easier to notice the energy in the mind: is it relaxing too much and drifting, or working too hard to stay focused?

No intelligence was needed for the chicks to teach me a valuable lesson on Right Effort. Any takeaway I had did not affect their persistence, which continued the next day when they escaped again. I learned another important lesson: when to quit. I enlisted the professionals (a man who lives at the farm and his son) to capture the chicks using the power of two. They also addressed the more fundamental problem of shoring up the enclosure. One day of dancing had been enough.