Don’t Stop Smelling The Chickens
Wow, this will be my fifth blog post. How the time flies!
I’ll start by asking if you have ever been to the state of Delaware. It’s cool if you haven’t. Delaware is sort of out of the way, other than if you are driving on I-95 and heading from say Baltimore to New York and you’re going to take the New Jersey Turnpike. Then you pretty much just drive through a small sliver of Delaware on your way to New Jersey.
My wife and I moved to Delaware in 1999, not all that long after we were married. We had been to Delaware once prior to do an interview for the job I was taking. During that trip we had been up to Wilmington, a far flung city. Not hugely populated, but very spread out. My feeling was that, being the first state and all (there you go history buffs) Delaware must just be wall to wall people. As in, most of the available land must have already been settled and populated.
And that is in fact what the top third of Delaware is like. City blocks, factories, chemical plants. Densely populated, tightly packed community’s. But if you go south and cross over the big canal that splits the state, you suddenly find what the other two thirds of Delaware is like. Farmland. Other than the beaches (and Dover Airforce Base) pretty much every other space is occupied by farmland. Oh, and chicken farms. Hundreds and hundreds of chicken farms.
Now I grew up in Idaho and in fact spent a lot of time on a farm. Farms don’t bother me and I was pleasantly surprised to see all these wonderful tracts of wheat and corn. That was until the wind would change and the smell of the chicken farms would blow into town. I’ve worked on a dairy, shoveled cow manure, the works. Nothing I had smelled before prepared me for the smell of the long chicken houses.
Here’s the thing though. After a few months of living in Delaware the smell suddenly seemed to disappear. I initially thought this had something to do with it being winter. And while I’m guessing that did play a part, it wasn’t the main thing. Because the rest of my time living there, I would only notice the chicken farms on particularly hot and humid days, when the smell would be magnified. Otherwise, I completely stopped noticing them. But what had happened.
Well, the easiest answer is that I got used to it. The smell was obviously still there, but I had become so accustomed to it, that I didn’t notice it anymore. And that my friends is the point of this particular post.
When I used to manage large groups of people I would often tell them the story of the chicken farms. The reason was that I wanted them to understand how easy it is for us to make something palatable once we have gotten used to it. If you work in a restaurant for example, the longer you ignore, say a messy food line or poorly cleaned equipment, the less noticeable it becomes. If you are in a relationship where you aren’t the priority, but you are afraid of not having ANY relationship, you may let the rest slide, and slowly stop noticing it.
To preachy? Maybe, but my point stands. We all have things that we stomach until they suddenly stop seeming so bad. In the case of having foul (see what I did there) smelling farms stationed all around your home, there isn’t much to be done, other than be grateful for your nose getting used to it. But in many other places in life, we make the CHOICE to ignore the stink, and thereby accept that it is just how things are.
We eventually moved out of Delaware and away from the chicken farms. You can do the same, if you put your mind to it…