How can a turtle represent some people?

Another shameless fable

I have a friend who lives near a creek that he likes to go walk around and explore sometimes.  A couple of weeks ago he found a turtle that had climbed up over the creek in order to sun himself, which turtles are notably fond of doing, and is only right and proper behavior for turtles in the know.

However, this sad fellow had made a mistake.  The logs that he’d decided to use as his platform for his Solar Light Therapy had turned out to be unsure how able to support him they would be in this endeavor and, when push came to shove, turned out to be unreliable.  One of the logs, not able to stay aligned with its partner in this project, had waffled and the turtle slipped through the crack.

Aeons ago, turtles made a choice that their cousins, the lizards, didn’t make.  The turtle clan of the world made what seemed to them at the time quite the most reasonable choice.  They opted for protection rather than flexibility.  A hard shell dismayed most predators, and you were less likely to get your tail tweaked by playful dinosaur babies if you could pull it into the shell.  Lizards decided that, rather than protect themselves, they’d rather be able to run away or twist out from between nippy jaws.  They didn’t always make it, of course, but there’s a drawback to trying to protect yourself by insulating yourself away from the scrapes of a sometimes dangerous world, which the turtle learned to his profound dismay.

He slipped between the crack, all right, but his shell stuck!  And there he hung, embarrassed and vulnerable, scratching feebly at the wood, trying to get himself out.  Fortunately for him, my friend fancies himself to be a guy who’s warmly inclined towards nature.  He looked at the situation and smirked.

“I think you’re stuck!” he said to the turtle, but it only turned its head away from him in either scorn or embarrassment.  Or maybe both.  Turtles don’t always like being helped, and it’s certainly difficult to maintain dignity when your bottom half is hanging between two sticks.  “I can help you, if you’d like,” my friend said (although he also took the picture you see here, which the turtle did not seem to appreciate, either).

The turtle sighed.  He hated being stuck more than he disliked getting help.  “All right,” he said.  “You can help me.”

My friend, standing at the bank. gently spread the two logs wider and wider till the gap was large enough to allow the turtle’s chief source of inflexibility, his shell, to slip through and he dropped into the water with a small splash.  Now that’s actually an ok result for turtles–they like dropping into water.  My friend thought his good deed was done and that all was settled now, but, sadly, the turtle was a stubborn terrapin.  As soon as he’d landed in the water, he swam to the opposite bank, climbed out, and started walking back onto those exact same two logs!  It was as if his past experience had simply been wiped from his mind.  He couldn’t get out of his own pattern enough to try a different spot to sun himself!  My friend walked off, shaking his head, amused, but feeling kind of sorry for the poor stubborn little guy.

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”  Albert Einstein

Fortunately, we are not turtles.  Contact us here at Bright Mind and we can help you find better locations to sun yourself, or at least help you set up a sturdier support!