Letting go of the rice...

I first read this story almost two years ago when Richard sent it out in an email. I held onto it because I thought it taught a good lesson. Today, as I was cleaning up my email, I read it again and decided to post it.






Indians in South America use a simple but ingenious hand-made trap to catch monkeys. They cut a small hole into the side of a coconut, scrape out the interior, and lash the coconut shell to a tree with leather cord or vine. They place a small amount of rice in the coconut as bait and leave the trap over night. A monkey comes swinging along, spies the rice and reaches into the coconut to grab it. The trick to this trap is the size of the hole. The monkey can get his hand in, but once he grabs the rice, his fist will not go back through the opening. He is trapped. Freedom appears to be very simple. If the monkey would only let go of the rice, he could remove his hand. But, like many of us, when we have our hands on something we are familiar with, it is very hard to let go. In the jungles of South America if the trapper fails to return to check his trap, as they sometimes do, monkeys have been known to starve to death, clinging to the rice. Fortunately, people are smarter than monkeys most of the time.