The Power of exploring Boundaries

Read following story as foreword in the book Awareness from Anthony De Mello.?

?"A man found an eagle's egg and put it in a nest of a barnyard hen. The eaglet hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them. All his life the eagle did what the barnyard chicks did, thinking he was a barnyard chicken. He scratched the earth for worms and insects. He clucked and cackled. And he would thrash his wings and fly a few feet into the air.?

Years passed and the eagle grew very old. One day he saw a magnificent bird above him in the cloudless sky. It glided in graceful majesty among the powerful wind currents, with scarcely a beat on his strong golden wings. The old eagle looked up in awe. "Who's that?" he asked. "That's the eagle, the king of the birds," said his neighbor. "He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth - we're chickens." So the eagle lived and died a chicken, for that's what he thought he was."?

We all get comfortable in the places where we are and not recognize the power of exploring our boundaries. Our capabilities are defined by our boundaries and many times we struggle to explore the very boundaries set around us either because of self-imposed walls or from our circumstances.?

Every time we innovate, we are stretching our known assumptions and hence stretching the boundaries. New learnings and new products will never happen if we don’t stretch our boundaries.

Are we the eagle who behaved like chicken or explore our boundaries and stretch ourselves to have a powerful flight like the eagle. What are the boundaries that we could stretch today to learn new things?