Simple yet elusive..

I was browsing through a book in a library (that I had already read) titled "Catch me a colobus". Colobus is a monkey and if I recollect correctly, they live primarily in Africa or the author (Durrell) catches one in Africa. It reminded me of some thing that I have been meaning to share and completely forgot for a long time (as long as two years! And especially after my hubby accusing me of becoming a wastrel, I gotta share something on the blog, so I thought i would atleast do this).

Again I am not too sure whether the method described below is the one the author narrated or is something I came across elsewhere (oh, its been quite a long time I read the book!)

Anyways, the point is the ingenious simplicity in which the monkey is caught. The trap is just an urn. The mouth of the urn is big enough for a hand to go in and becomes narrow enough to trap the hand in when the hand holds something. So you basically cannot let go of the urn if you are trying to taken something out of the urn. Now, the monkey enticed by the thing inside the urn, puts its hand inside the urn but it can't take out. It struggles and struggles without any luck to have the thing it was drawn to and loses its consciousness of the surroundings. And lo! it gets caught. It does not gets what it so desperately wanted and on top of it, it loses its freedom, which is even more costly.

When I read of it, I could not help but wonder how very similar our traits are. I mean, isn't this situation all too familiar? We do this all this time in our life. It is so very similar to the ingenius simplicity with which we land ourselves in a deadlock. We keep on struggling holding on to something thats not all that great and spend our more valuable time and energy on it and on top of it, in the process, we sometimes lose our peace of mind. We undertake something and expect to succeed. Fair enough but when things dont go all that well after putting in every thing we have got, we simply fail to move on. We keep going round and round in circles to feed our ego holding on to that one thing. We miss the big point that - we have to let go of the thing that is inside the urn to extricate ourselves. Not only does it give us an opportunity to move, it also puts the power to do something back into our hands. We got to make that choice or sometimes, the consequence would be more costly.

So, what choice have you made today?