Jail is cool. Well maybe that didn’t come out right, don’t quote me but I’m just saying, I wouldn’t have been caught dead watching Animal Planet on the streets, yet here I am, on a Tuesday night, enthralled in a show about elephants. Elephants? Yo’, they’re smart as hell. They have memories from when they were infants, advanced ways of communication, they tell jokes, crazy smart. Yet sometimes they’re so easy to capture and manipulate. One trainer says the way he gets his elephants to stay is simple, he locks a chain around one of their legs and ties that chain to a stick that’s stuck in the ground. A stick? Nah, nah, he’s joking…right? I wish I were lying but an elephant the size of a house, is scared of a stick! Crazy, but when you hear the background, you’ll understand. So, when the elephants are infants, to keep them from running they wrap a chain around one of their legs and then wrap the other end to a tree stump. The baby elephant will pull and pull with all its might, to no avail. It grows a little older, and bigger and keeps pulling until eventually it realizes it can’t uproot this stump. It gives up, FOREVER. So now as a full grown adult, with amazing recall, the elephant has memories of that chain and that stump and knows there’s no way to run, it’s pointless to waste energy, even though they can pull 1000 sticks, it has lost its will to fight, not so smart after all. That elephant reminds me a lot of myself in so many ways and people in general. We’re more often, than not, prisoners of our past. We never forget that heartbreak, that loss, that failure, that one negative statement someone said and we just give up and accept it as reality. We stay stagnant and never elevate because last time we took a chance we failed miserably. I’d rather just settle right here because this is comfortable and I won’t experience any pain, right? Wrong! With that mindset you’re just living to die and you’ll always have regrets or be the “coulda’ guy/girl…”I coulda’ been Lebron bro, if I would have just put some more work in.” “I coulda’ been rich ,if I would have put that money into Amazon stocks 10 years ago.” Yea alright. Look at kids, ages 2-6, so full of life, fearless. They experience joy from the simplest things because they don’t have a past, they have nothing to deter them from future windows of opportunity or joy. They don’t have any memories of the tree stump or the chain. We do, but we have to understand that we’re full grown elephants now, and with each day comes a new opportunity to break the chain, even when it seems difficult and you experience resistance, your desire to live how you want to live will give u the strength that you’ve always possessed to pull free. Don’t be scared of sticks, FOO, simple.
