THE DOG WHO WALKED ON WATER

A man took his new hunting dog on a trial hunt one day.  After a while he managed to shoot a duck and it fell in the lake.  The dog walked over the water, picked up the duck, and brought it to his master.

The man was stunned.  He didn’t know what to think.  He shot another duck and again, it fell into the lake and again the dog walked over the water and brought it back to his master.

Hardly daring to believe his eyes, and not wanting to be thought a total fool, he told no-one about it – but the next day he called his neighbour to come shooting with him.  As on the previous day he shot a duck and it fell into the lake.  The dog walked over the water and got it.

His neighbour didn’t say a word.  Several more ducks got shot that day – and each time the dog walked over the water to retrieve them – and each time the neighbour said nothing and neither did the owner of the dog.

Finally – unable to contain himself any longer the owner asked his neighbour – “do you notice anything strange about my dog?”

Yes – replied the neighbour – rubbing his chin and thinking a bit – come to think of it I do – your dog doesn’t know how to swim.”

Source: Robert Johnson, A Sermon A Day
Volume 2 (page 61)

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TWO GUYS HUNTING – Here’s a different version of the same story

These two guys used to go hunting with each other. One was positive and one was negative, every time.

The positive guy discovered something he didn’t feel the negative guy could complain about. He discovered a bird dog that could walk on water.

They were having a great day. They hit a duck. It landed in the water. The dog walked on water to pick up the duck and brought it back. The positive guy was smiling and the negative guy was frowning.

They hit a second duck. The dog walked on water out to the duck and brought it back. The positive guy was grinning like a gopher in soft dirt while the negative guy was cold and sour.

After they hit the third duck and the dog walked on water to retrieve it, the positive guy looked at the negative guy and said, “Haven’t you noticed anything about my new dog?” The negative guy said, “I have only noticed one thing. Your dog can’t swim!”

CONSIDER THIS

• Point: Everything in life is the way you look at it.

• Have you ever missed the point? The neighbour or the hunter with a negative outlook on life, missed the point completely. He couldn’t see the wonder of a dog that could walk on water; he could only see that the dog didn’t do what other hunting dogs do to retrieve ducks – that is to swim.

• How do you react or respond when you experience something that  is outside your normal frame of reference?

 

 

LAST WORDS

Alice Kahana, an artist living in Houston, has a painful and vivid memory of her journey to Auschwitz as a fifteen-year-old girl. On the way, she became separated from her parents and found herself in charge of her little eight-year-old brother. When the boxcar arrived, she looked down and saw that the boy was missing a shoe . “Why are you so stupid !” she shouted at him, the way older sisters are inclined to do so. “Can’t you keep track of your things?”

This is nothing out of the ordinary except that those were the last words that passed between them, for they were herded into different cars and she never saw him again.

Nearly half a century later, Alice Kahana is still living by a distinction that was conceived in that maelstrom. She vowed not to say anything that could not stand as the last thing she ever said.

Source: Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander,
The Art of Possibility
(New York: Penguin Books, 2000) page 174

CONSIDER THIS

• Be sure to taste your words before you spit them out.
• Raise your words, not your voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.

TWO BAD BRICKS

After we purchased the land for our monastery in 1983 we were broke. We were in debt. There were no buildings on the land, not even a shed. Those first few weeks we slept not on beds but on old doors we had bought cheaply from the salvage yard; we raised them on bricks at each corner to lift them off the ground. (There were no mattresses, of course — we were forest monks.)

The abbot had the best door, the flat one. My door was ribbed with a sizeable hole in the center where the doorknob would have been. I joked that now I wouldn’t need to get out of bed to go to the toilet! The cold truth was, however, that the wind would come up through that hole. I didn’t sleep much those nights.

We were poor monks who needed buildings. We couldn’t afford to employ a builder — the materials were expensive enough. So I had to learn how to build: how to prepare the foundations, lay concrete and bricks, erect the roof, put in the plumbing — the whole lot. I had been a theoretical physicist and high-school teacher in lay life, not used to working with my hands. After a few years, I became quite skilled at building, even calling my crew the BBC (“Buddhist Building Company”). But when I started it was very difficult.

It may look easy to lay a brick: a dollop of mortar underneath, a little tap here, a little tap there. But when I began laying bricks, I’d tap one corner down to make it level and another corner would go up. So I’d tap that corner down then the brick would move out of line. After I’d nudged it back into line, the first corner would be too high again. Hey, you try it!

Being a monk, I had patience and as much time as I needed. I made sure every single brick was perfect, no matter how long it took. Eventually, I completed my first brick wall and stood back to admire it. It was only then that I noticed— oh no! — I’d missed two bricks. All the other bricks were nicely in line, but these two were inclined at an angle. They looked terrible. They spoiled the whole wall. They ruined it.

By then, the cement mortar was too hard for the bricks to be taken out, so I asked the abbot if I could knock the wall down and start over again — or, even better, perhaps blow it up. I’d made a mess of it and I was very embarrassed. The abbot said no, the wall had to stay.

When I showed our first visitors around our fledgling monastery, I always tried to avoid taking them past my brick wall. I hated anyone seeing it. Then one day, some three or four months after I finished it, I was walking with a visitor and he saw the wall.

“That’s a nice wall,” he casually remarked.

“Sir,” I replied in surprise, “have you left your glasses in your car? Are you visually impaired? Can’t you see those two bad bricks which spoil the whole wall?”

What he said next changed my whole view of that wall, of myself, and of many other aspects of life. He said, “Yes. I can see those two bad bricks. But I can see the 998 good bricks as well.”

I was stunned. For the first time in over three months, I could see other bricks in that wall apart from the two mistakes. Above, below, to the left and to the right of the bad bricks were good bricks, perfect bricks. Moreover, the perfect bricks were many, many more than the two bad bricks. Before, my eyes would focus exclusively on my two mistakes; I was blind to everything else. That was why I couldn’t bear looking at that wall, or having others see it. That was why I wanted to destroy it. Now that I could see the good bricks, the wall didn’t look so bad after all. It was, as the visitor had said, ‘a nice brick wall.’ It’s still there now, twenty years later, but I’ve forgotten exactly where those bad bricks are. I literally cannot see those mistakes any more.

Source | Ajahn Brahm,
Who Ordered This Truckload of Dung?
(Wisdom Publications, 2005) pages 3-6

CONSIDER THIS

We’ve all got our two bad bricks, but the perfect bricks in each one of us are much, much more than the mistakes. How much life goes wasted, how much potential goes unexplored and how many relationships are damaged or broken because of an unhealthy focus on the “two bad bricks”?