Hanging around animals is lots of fun, and they always teach you something. Recently my daughter Arri got a bunch of chickens: a rooster she bought off of Craigslist (cheap) and five she’s raised from baby chicks. The chickens are now adolescents, probably about five months old.

Chickens spend a lot of time scratching in the grass and dirt, pecking at whatever shows up beneath their beaks. “Heads down” describes it best.

Last week we had our first windy autumn day, and thousands of leaves blew off the trees and came wafting down toward the ground. The chickens freaked out. I can almost promise you that one said to another, “The sky is falling, the sky is falling!”

And from their vantage point, of course it did look like the sky was falling.

This got me thinking about perspective, about being “heads down,” looking only at what’s right in front of you and scratching away at that. If, instead, you look up and around, it’s a lot easier to interpret what you think you see.

So when you find yourself freaking out and thinking “the sky is falling, the sky is falling” it might just be a reminder to look up, look around, and notice what else might be going on.

Just a little bit of wisdom from down on the farm.