It occurred to me today that it might be time to stop.
They say that the first thing to do when you’re in a hole is to stop digging, which –I would gather– means that we ought not continue to do the things that make things bad, if we’d like to avoid making things worse.
As intuitive as that advice sounds, you would think that no one, after realizing themselves to be in a hole, would ever continue to dig.
But, they do.
The question is, “Why?!?!”
If you know that what you’ve been doing has been taking you down the wrong path, why would you keep doing it? To answer that, in a general sense, we could probably all look inside of our pasts to see what motivated us to keep digging, in those specific situations where we made that mistake. And, let’s be honest, we’ve probably all been in that position once or twice.
Perhaps, you were so far down the road that you figured that it wouldn’t be any good to try to turn around, so late. That’s how Shakespeare’s Macbeth felt; in Scene 4 of Act 3, Macbeth is lamenting the fact that he has shed so much blood, to attain power and to keep it, that he decides to just keep going. He says, “I am in blood / Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er”
Or, perhaps, you didn’t really want to stop doing what you were doing. I think you see this at the end of Disney’s Pinocchio, when Pinocchio realizes that there is something wrong on Pleasure Island, but he’s not necessarily so troubled by it, initially, as to turn away and run.
Some people, for better or for worse, just like to dig holes. They end up in bad situations almost as a secondary result of who they are.
But, if you pan out a little bit, to get a more ‘macro’ view of things, we as a nation have arrived at a point where, IMO, we are significantly stuck down a hole. The problem with this scenario is that, as a nation, we might be stuck down a hole, but only a few of us are aware, at this early stage. Perhaps the most observant among us knew even earlier. But, we are still looking at a length of time, I think, before enough people realize that we are somewhere, as a nation, that we don’t want to be, at which point we can agree to enact some kind of an ‘about face’.
Change in groups is harder to enact than change in individuals, if for no other reason than the group is at the mercy of those group members who are only apt to realize much later that change is necessary.
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If you’re not a Christian music fan, than this might not mean much of anything to you, but there is a popular Christian band named “Casting Crowns” –probably one of my favorite bands of all time– and they sing a song that I want to mention, in connection with the topic of this post. In fact, if you follow the band, and you read the title of this post, then you know which song I’m referencing. Slow Fade is a song about how we often end up in the worst places, not because we are magically transported there, but because we took steps –tiny, seemingly inconsequential steps– that build upon each other to deliver us to the places we would have never thought to tread.
Which is pretty similar to what I often say about frogs –> You can’t boil a live frog by tossing it in a pot of boiling water, because it’ll just jump right back out. But, if you put a frog in a pot of lukewarm water, and you slowly raise the temperature, the frog will just sit there and eventually get cooked.
I wrote about this poor frog all the way back in 2018; that post is HERE, if you are interested. I’m not going to beat that particular horse –or frog– all over again.
But, at about the same time when the song Slow Fade was topping the charts of Christian music, I was lamenting a friend who’d gotten himself into quite the pickle. Through a series of small, seemingly inconsequential steps, each one advancing him further down a road, he ended up cheating on his wife. The thing about ending up in a place like this is, it’s not that hard; all you have to do is take a few baby-steps –IN THE WRONG DIRECTION– and you can accomplish this amazing feat. Seems like I’ve talked about this before, too –> check it out HERE.
If you ever find yourself in a situation like this, where it seems like you’ve arrived somewhere that you never intended to be, the question to ask isn’t “How did I get here?”; the real question is, “How do I get out?”
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One of the things that drives me the craziest about being a teacher is room temperature. When you’re a teacher, and students walk into your room at the start of class, they often say things like, “Mr. Brackett, it’s cold in here!” or “Mr. Brackett, why is it so hot in here?”
The problem with these kinds of statements from students, many of whom really just have a hard time starting a conversation with someone, if not for the ‘opening complaint’ bit, is that our room temperatures in the high school are climate-controlled, which means that they are always, during regular school hours, within a couple of tenths of a degree of the same temperature, all year round.
So, the kid who left home with a t-shirt and jeans on –IN FEBRUARY– comes into a room that is 72.1 degrees and says, “Mr. Brackett, it’s cold in here!”, that same kid will show up on the last day of school in June, wearing the same clothes, and the room will be 72.2 degrees. That kid is going to say, “Mr. Brackett, why is it so hot in here?”
Nothing has changed. The temperature hasn’t changed –not significantly, anyway– and their attire hasn’t changed, but in their mind, it’s a world of difference. The real difference is in their minds.
This is the same issue that further complicates our awareness of the tiny degrees by which our circumstances can change.
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If my students would look at the temperature readout on the thermostat in my room, everyday, they would come to understand what 72 degrees actually feels like. Then, with that understanding, they would be able to tell, truly, if the temperature was too high or too low, because they would understand what 72 feels like.
They would also, hopefully, stop making their silly complaints about their opinion of the room temperature.
Similarly, we need to, as people, develop an understanding that keeps us from becoming frog-legs, which is to say that we should come to understand when things are getting bad, before they get so bad that we are screwed.
I don’t think many of us have been paying attention, in our personal lives, or to the situation in our world. We didn’t get magically teleported here; we got here because none of the steps along the way were so alarming as to cause us to stop our downhill journey.
It Occurred To Me Today 