An elephant came to the edge of a stream of clear rushing water.
Being thirsty, the elephant leaned over, dropped its trunk into the
cool water and... plunk!
"What? What happened?" the elephant cried. "I can't see! My eye...
it fell in the water! Oh nooooooh," the elephant wailed in a panic,
"I lost my eye!"
And, in fact, the elephant's right eye had popped out of its
socket and fallen into the stream. The elephant searched frantically
for the eye, groping with its trunk along the bottom of the stream.
The more he groped, the cloudier the water became. That made him
panic even more, and he started churning up great piles of sand, until
he couldn't see anything.
Then the elephant heard the sound of laughing. Furious, he
looked around to see who it was, and saw a little green frog sitting
on a log, laughing and laughing.
"You think this is funny?" the elephant shouted. "I lose an eye
and that makes you laugh?"
"What's funny is to see how upset you are. Calm down and everything
will be fine," the frog replied.
The elephant felt a little ashamed and took the frog's advice.
He stopped moving his trunk around, and soon the water became clearer
as the sand sank to the bottom. And there in the stream lay his eye.
He reached for it with his trunk and popped it back into its socket.
And then he thanked the frog.
This simple parable contains great wisdom. There's nothing funny
about losing an eye... the sudden panic, thrashing around in murky
water, desperation... that's exactly what happens to us when we lose control and panic. Our haste makes us blind.
We become temporarily incapable of seeing the world around us
objectively and rationally. But there is an antidote to panic: wait.
Wait until the situation becomes clear and the black clouds disperse.
"Haste is the devil's work;
God works slowly."
