“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing,” according to some sage. I am a slow learner with limited aptitude. I don’t pretend to know many things. But I have learned one great thing: Leap before you look.

If you stop and think, you’ll never get anywhere. You’ll get bogged down with doubts and fears. No one ever gets married or opens a restaurant who looks before he leaps. The risks of failure are too great.

Hurl yourself into the abyss. I’ve piled up a mountain of regrets by ignoring that principle. As a young man, I was once seized by the desire to raise pigs. But before I took the plunge, I got a book on the subject. Pigs, I read, were subject to all manner of diseases with ugly names brucellosis, rhinitis, erysipelas, leptospirosis. Pigs produce an odor that can bring you to your knees. Pigs make pigs of themselves. They behave “like pigs.” And they bite. Pigs can be dangerous. When someone says, “Not since the pigs ate my granny,” it’s not a laughing matter.

Alas, such considerations reasoned me out of raising pigs. How different life might have been if I’d leaped before I looked. Think of the knowledge I’d have accumulated about pigs. I’d be a Swineherd Emeritus by now.

I vowed to change myself. When I was recently possessed by the impulse to get into the poultry business, I took instant action. Buy the birds first, I told myself. You can learn how to take care of them later. So I ran out and bought two hens and a rooster at the Overbrook Pet Swap without having figured out where to put them or what to feed them. If I’d thought twice or consulted a book, I’d have fallen into the slough of prudence. I’d have missed out on the character-building hassles, messes, tragedies and the occasional joys of chicken husbandry.

The lives of chickens have been intertwined with our own since the beginning of time. You can hardly understand what it is to be a human being if your experience of chickens is confined to the plucked and packaged product sold at grocery stores.

Only by plunging your hands into a sack of poultry crumbles can you understand what’s meant by the sardonic expression, “chicken feed.” And you have to clean out a chicken coop to get the full import of that other common, unprintable “chicken” expression.

“Scarce as hens’ teeth,” “tighter than the instep of a chicken,” “the fox guarding the chicken coop,” “the pecking order,” “Chicken Little.” Our ability to express ourselves would be much impoverished without chickens.

Speaking of Chicken Little, one day some doomsday jet thundered overhead. The ground trembled. The rooster ran amok, throwing himself against the sides of the coop. The hens cocked their heads and looked upward in mindless fright. Chicken Little was written all over their faces.

But let’s not be too hasty to laugh. How many human beings cry, “The sky is falling,” at the first wink of the unknown?

Life is cheap in the poultry business and reminders of mortality visit you every day. No one understands as well as the chicken man the adage, “Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.” Seven of the dozen chicks I bought for broilers perished to the cold. One of my hens, for no apparent reason, just decided to give up the ghost. The dogs got the other. The rooster caught his leg in the pen and panicked to death.

Chicken raisers take it all in stride. After all, a chick costs less than a dollar. A friend generously gave me a replacement rooster.

“You saved him from becoming coq au vin,” he said. “Come back and get another if this one dies.”

Another friend has his children participate in the conclusion of their chickens’ lives, “so that they know where dinner comes from.” Once, when he mentioned to his wife that their freezer was running low, their 3-year-old son overheard him. Soon he appeared with a hatchet in his hand. “Hey, Dad, let’s go kill some chickens.”

But chickens are also life-affirming inspirations. I had about given up on my laying hen when one day in the middle of winter I spotted a miracle in her nest.

“Birdie!” I cried. “Look what you have done. Our financial problems are over. We shall have a free egg every day.”

I remember the first time my rooster attempted to greet the morning sun. It was not the clarion call of Chanticleer. It sounded like a rusty Model T. But never mind. It was a cock-a-doodle-do. He was astonished at the noise he’d made and kept it up all day.

I used to enjoy watching him strut. Inside the safety of his pen he swaggered like a tiger. All of a sudden he’d dash at the hens, just for the fun of making them lift their feathered skirts and scream. He was a good rooster. May he rest in peace.

What have I learned, besides the great truth that thought is the enemy of action? I have also learned that intimacy with chickens makes fried chicken less appealing than it used to be. When you look at a golden brown drumstick, it’s impossible not to imagine a bird with feathers running around the barnyard, clucking and picking at bugs. One wishes for a raw carrot or a stick of celery. Chicken doesn’t make one’s mouth water any more.

George Gurley, who lives in rural Baldwin, writes a monthly column for the Journal-World.