A beautiful way to explain the risk of not letting go is the story of the monkey and the nuts & sweets. When the monkey catchers in India want to catch a wee monkey to sell to a rich family as a pet, they dig a little hole in the ground and place a small timber board over the top with a hole the size of a monkey’s wrist. Under the board in the hole they place sweets and nuts. They wait patiently until a monkey comes along, smelling the delicious nuts and sweets, he sticks his little arm down there to snatch at the treats, and then wraps his hand around them forming a fist. However the fist won’t fit through the hole, only his skinny wrist. So he starts scrambling around attempting to get them out, and then the monkey catcher comes along and as he approaches the monkey starts screeching and wrenching his arm around but he refuses to let go of the sweets and nuts. He knows he will be caught, and even when the catcher simply throws a sack over him and picks him up he clutches onto the sweets with his little fist. If he had only let go of those treats he would have been free, but he rigidly would not let go of them. The irony is those nuts and fruits can be found in all the local trees.
We must ask, where in life are we the monkey’s, screeching and making a fuss over something so small that we could have let go of so easily, that is so feel available to us elsewhere, to create our own freedom?
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