Today let’s talk about boiling frogs and crabs. Not a nice thought, but let’s use these as analogies.
Have you heard that if you throw a frog in hot water, it will smartly jump right out? But if you put the frog in lukewarm warm, and heat the water slowly to a boil, the frog will get mesmerized and let itself get cooked. More on this in a moment.
With crabs, it is said that if you boil live crabs–which hopefully we stop doing–if one crab tries to get out of the pot, the others will reach up with their claws and pull the one that is trying to escape back into the boiling water.
So here is the analogy. We are like frogs and crabs. We humans have slowly gotten mesmerized and used to and accepted insanity in our world, such as war, half aliveness, fearful lives, working 60 hours a week, insane politics, etc. We have come to think that this is just the way it is, and we stay in the pot as the temperature rises until we have the life cooked out of us.
With the crabs, we are so competitive that we get jealous when we finally see someone say, enough! When someone tries to tell us that we are much bigger and stronger and more capable than we have been taught, we call them crazy, and we try to pull them back into the water with us. In the past, we would burn them at the stake. Countless saints and sages have tried to tell us that we are more than human, that we are miracles workers. Many of them we crucified. Then we went back to our lives of quiet desperation.
So, how about if we first, stop killing the sages, and second, stop cooking ourselves and those who try to escape the cultural pot? It is much more fun that being cooked alive.
It does take courage to climb over the edge of the pot. Change is scary. We don’t know what is out there. It is a leap of faith. We don’t know where we will land. It will be new terrain. Some will try to pull us back into what is familiar, even if it is toxic and life draining.
The familiar calls us back, over and over, until one day we say, what the heck. I know what it’s like in the pot of boiling water. It is killing me slowly. So, what do I have to lose? How about if we leap up and out of the pot and see this as a beautiful adventure, which it actually is. What if we leaped right on through that fear and into a life worth living? And when enough of us do this, we will wake up and stop boiling frogs, crabs and each other.
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