There was once a poor farmer's widow who had many hungry children, but no food to feed them. One day she found an egg, and overjoyed, she ran to her children and told them that their troubles were finally over. "I will take this egg and ask our neighbors if I can put it under one of their sitting hens until it hatches.
But we won't eat the chicken. We'll set her on her own eggs until they hatch, and they will have many more eggs which will hatch into many more chickens.
When we have enough of them, we'll sell them and buy a cow, and she'll have calves. Then, we'll be able to sell some of the calves and buy a field. Then, we'll have a field, and cows, and chickens and eggs and milk, and we'll never be in want again.
She was so excited by her vision of the future, that she accidentally dropped the egg. It broke, and with it went all her hopes and dreams.
The moral of this story was explained by Rabbi Chaim of Sanz who said: "We are all like the poor woman in this story. When the days of teshuva are here we make all kinds of wonderful resolutions. We will do this and do that, we will reform all of our undesirable traits and rectify all of our misdeeds. And yet, as the time goes by, we somehow fail to make the moves that would set our good resolutions into motion, and we are the same people as we were before. Therefore, we must do everything to ensure that we carry out our resolutions to do teshuva when the opportunity is before us."
