There once was a wild goose that laid golden eggs. She was very proud of her eggs, but nobody seemed to want them. Life had changed so much since the original legend, that golden eggs were no longer the thing.
Before she realised this, she tried everything to make her golden eggs more desirable. Thinking they were maybe too soft, she added an artificial hardener. She managed to sell one extra-hard egg, but the customer came back complaining that the egg was not a real egg; it was much too tough, and promptly took out a law suit against her.
Her reputation ruined, she moved to a different pond, and set about decorating her eggs. But the one good thing about golden eggs is their colour, and she had no success with this new venture either. She depleted her already desperate resources paying for the decorating materials, which obviously she could not recoup.
Bitter and disillusioned, she wandered off to yet another new pond, and bemoaned her situation to the water fowl there.
“Nobody wants my eggs” she lamented.
“Why do you want to get rid of them?” asked a mallard.
“I have to make a living” said goosey.
“Then make them virtual. Nobody wants the real thing nowadays” said a heron.
Goosey had not the slightest idea of what a virtual egg could be, let alone how to make one. She wandered off once again to a new place, cursing her gift.
“I thought life would be so easy”, she moaned to herself. “When I started to lay, everybody was delighted at my golden eggs. The other young geese were jealous. I thought I had it made. I thought I would never have any worries. But here I am, a mature goose, unable to produce anything of worth. It never occurred to me that golden eggs might go out of fashion. At one point in time, they were the very symbol of wealth and power. Gold was the thing, then. I thought I was sitting on a goldmine, so to speak. So I gave them all away. It seemed to be the only fair thing to do, since I had been blessed with the ability to effortlessly create something of such value. Look at me now”, she whined disconsolately, catching sight of her bedraggled appearance in the frozen surface of the pond.
Years went by, and the goose lived on in the hope of finding someone who still wanted perfectly plain, authentic, golden eggs. Until her clutches started to diminish. Pretty soon, she would be too old to lay any eggs at all.
Being a wild goose, and thinking she had the ability to create limitless wealth, she had never before worried about her old age. But as her energy declined, the idea of finding herself helpless and destitute loomed large in her mental landscape. She began to seriously think of her ability as a curse. Had she not been endowed with the supposedly magical ability to produce something extra-ordinary, she might well have turned her mind sooner, when it was quicker and more alert, to finding a way of producing something useful. It was true, she surmised, that she now had the benefit of experience. And snippets of advice she had garnered here and there – try virtual eggs, for example – that she had not yet had the opportunity to assimilate or try to apply.
“The worst that can happen” she said to herself, “is that I shall die looking. Die looking for a way of making something useful. Something that other geese or other creatures want. Something that they would be willing to exchange food and material comfort for. That is not so bad, in terms of a destiny,” she continued. “Being on a quest is infinitely desirable to feeling one has found something”.
And so she cheered up considerably. She started to take an interest in her community, for even wild geese have a community. Wild geese are not solitary, they are just un-domesticated. They still make use of the power of the group for wing formations and defence. There was even a tiny inkling of an idea at the back of her mind that, if her quest remained unfulfilled, for lack of time, it might just serve young goslings of future generations who were born with a gift similar to hers. They could take up the quest where she left off.
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