It occurred to me today that there are a lot of situations that could be described by the concept of diamonds in horse manure.

Let’s say, for example, that I took $500,000 worth of diamonds and I evenly distributed those in one ton of horse manure? Would you go looking for them?

Maybe your answer is a quick yes, but what if I said that it was only $200,000 worth of diamonds, or what if I told you that you had to look through two tons of manure. Is there a balance, or a ratio, beyond which you’d be opposed to this endeavor? Would you search for $10,000 worth of diamonds in five tons of horse manure?

The basic question is this: how much bad stuff are you willing to put up with to get some good stuff?

* * *

I have been thinking about trying to become a freelance writer, lately.

And so, I’ve signed up as a freelance writer on a couple of different freelancer sites, and I am sure that there are thousands upon thousands of users just like me on those sites, and the people who are looking to hire someone to write something for them aren’t going to wade through the thousands upon thousands of available writers that are available to find me, waiting and available. It’s too much work for them to do.

Or, if you look at it from the other side of the coin…

On one of these particular sites that I signed up for, I have been “hired” for jobs a half-dozen times over the last couple of weeks, and each time the employer ends up being some “businessman” from a foreign country (India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, to name a few) who wants me to partner with them as they tackle the U.S. job market.

Basically, these “businessmen” want me to work for them in some pyramid scheme were I employ my American friends under me and we all work for this man overseas, doing things that they won’t even mention until I’ve gone so far as to commit to being a part of one of these ventures.

How much of that particular horse manure am I willing to sort through to get to that one person who is looking for someone just like me to write something for them that I would totally knock out of the park?

* * *

I had a computer repair job come in the other day. A friend of a friend of a cousin of mine asked me to fix a laptop that was having problems booting up. When you turned the laptop on, it never made it all the way to the login screen. When I took the job, I told the guy that it would probably be a pretty easy fix and that there are only a few problems that tend to cause these kinds of issues.

And, a couple of hours later, I was looking for answers on the internet…

The way that things seem to go for me when I end up looking on the internet for assistance with a computer problem is that there is so much crap that it’s hardly worth wading through all of it. You find websites that only have the suggestions that you’ve already tried, or you find other websites that claim to have the answer, but they’re not even close. I searched and searched for the right answer, and I was ready to give up, but then…

…I found the website that had the advice that ended up working for me.

So, in light of the difficulty that I had during this particular job fixing this boot up issue, I created a document that I will keep that had the set of instructions that I looked very hard to find.

I mean, can you imagine going through the horse manure to find the diamonds, only to through the diamonds back into the horse manure –to prolong your own agony?!?!

* * *

I was at a community gathering the other night, hosted by the police department in my town. During the meeting, the police chief was talking about big city policing and how excited small town police departments have often been, in the past, to discover that they’ve been following the same protocols and procedures as the big city departments do.

The police chief said at this meeting the other night that he thinks that it’s time for big city police departments to start looking at small town departments, who are policing their municipalities with peace and service, rather than with brutality and domination, and it got me to thinking and my metaphor, here.

Who’s to say that the big city police departments are doing it right? Ask Breonna Taylor’s family or George Floyd’s family, and they would probably tell you that there is something wrong with their local police force and the way that they are handling things. Perhaps, small towns have more than a thing or two to teach to the big towns.

But, if you are a big city kind of a person, small towns are not your thing, just as the small town person is not interested in the big city. It’s not that either of these approaches are inherently correct or incorrect, but people have different preferences.

If you asked a gardener to dig around in a ton of manure to look for the half-million dollars in diamonds, they might just be more interested in the fertilizer. You can’t make the geraniums grow by sprinkling diamonds over their root structure.

* * *

The post is titled, “Diamonds in Horse Manure”, and while some would, in a mixture of one ton of horse manure and a couple of handfuls of diamonds, find more value in the manure than in the gems, others would go straight for the “girl’s best friend”. It’s certainly a matter of perspective, I suppose.

So, if this is true, and so much of how we look at life and what we are having to deal with is just a matter of perspective, then we ought to –in order to keep ourselves from being tossed around by the fickle and ever-changing circumstances of life– become highly skilled at looking at things at different perspectives.

So, why aren’t we?!?!

Why does it seem to be the case that so many people are just stuck looking at things from only one vantage point, incapable of the mental flexibility that it takes to consider things differently? If I were offered the opportunity to search in a ton of horse manure for a half-million dollars in diamonds, the very first thing I would do, I’d think, would be to start looking at horse manure from whatever other perspective would make me capable of digging around in equine feces.

The next time you’re in a spot or a jam, and you are frustrated by what you are having to endure in order to make it through, perhaps it would really be much simpler to look at the bad stuff as “not-so-bad-stuff”.