So there's a guy...so many good tales start with those words. This one isn't any exception.
This is an old tale in my lineage. It's about a dude having a pretty crappy day. In fact, in the history of crappy days, his is definitely one of the more craptacular. He was walking through a field when a pissed off elephant came charging out of nowhere. Anyone who's ever seen one of those When Animals Attack YouTube videos of elephants going beserk at the circus has an idea of what this guy saw bearing down on him. Picture a pissed off Mack Truck that has decided to make you less than a fly against the windshield. That's a level of fear that I imagine most of us would need clean underwear to handle. In my career as a bouncer, I've seen my fair share of fist fights, broken bottles, dealt with a couple knives on occasion, had guns pointed in my general direction by people who probably should not have guns, even faced down rabid soccer moms. Rampaging elephant is a whole nother level of pucker that I do not ever want to deal with.
So, the guy starts running away from the elephant. Not exactly much else to do there, right? He's running, his mind racing frantically faster than his feet trying at the same time to comprehend the GIANT FRIGGIN PISSED OFF ELEPHANT chasing him and searching for a way out of this situation. Up ahead, he sees that the elephant is driving him toward a cliff. Like this day can't get any worse, right?
Luckily, there's a tree on the other side of the ravine whose branches drape over the chasm. On one of those branches is a nice long vine. Salvation flashes before the dude's eyes, and he makes a leap of faith, soaring in slow motion across the chasm as the elephant sputters to a halt, staring angrily at the puny little man he will no longer be able to SMASH!!!
The dude hangs there over the chasm, looking back at the elephant and sticking out his tongue, perhaps even tossing a few more interesting hand gestures at the quivering tower of impotent rage that he had been so frightened of just nano-seconds before. "Now," the dude says to himself, "I'll just climb up this vine and use the tree branches to carry me to the safety on the other side of the ravine."
The dude begins to climb upward, looking at the branch. He sees two little mice come skurrying down the branch. One mouse is black, the other is white. These two dumb little rodents start chewing on the vine. Watching the vermin gnaw away, the guy realizes his day is still pretty crappy. There's no way he'll make it to the top of the vine before the mice chew their way through it. Of all the vines in all the trees in the world, they picked this one.
"No worries," the dude thinks. "I'll just drop into the river below and swim to shore."
So the dude looks downward...and sees four water moccasins (those would be poisonous snakes) swimming from each back, upstream and downstream. But wait, there's more! He could see the shadowy shape of a massive crocodile just under the surface. As soon as that branch broke, he was doomed.
Looking back up at the tree, the dude saw a beehive, covered in golden honey. The honey dripped on his face, its sweetness getting into his mouth. Tasting the delicious honey, he momentarily forgot about the cluster bomb he was caught in.
Now, we could look at this as a "glass half-full/half-empty" situation. Finding the good in the bad, or some other quaint little ditty. We could say that he was distracted by the honey. Or we could focus solely on looming doom on this dude's rather immanent horizon.
But what really was his situation?
If you think you're having a crappy day, or you think you're having a good day, what's the constant?
- MuSsang
News & Coming Events
For our schedule, check us out at the Baltimore Zen Center's Events page.
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