A Frog’s Tale

Radek Homola on Unsplash

Once there was a quiet, idyllic pond that was home to a great number of frogs. 

Frogs, as you know, can live in water and in air… they’re amphibians.  And they know how to travel easily from one environment to the other.  While their aquatic neighborhood is dark and safe, the terrestrial one is highly appealing to those adventurous enough to explore the sandy shore, the jungle, and beyond.

“Bull” Frog

Photo by Robert Zunikoff on Unsplash

There was among them, however, a particularly ambitious, rather large specimen. 

He was known among the population as “Bull” frog.  Now, Bull became particularly fond of the nearby jungle environment and wanted it all to himself.  So, he practiced his rhetorical skills and eventually he convinced the other frogs that he alone could protect them from the predators that lurked beyond the pond. 

As time passed, new tadpoles were born, and the older frogs, who remembered being on land, began to die off.  All the tadpoles were told early on about Bull.  They learned the rules of the pond, about how they had to stay in the water because Bull couldn’t protect them on land.  Eventually, those tadpoles became frogs who didn’t know they could survive out of the pond, or even that they could breathe air. 

Anytime one of these frogs started to climb out of the water, Bull would create a diversion.  His favorite was to point out some problem in the pond that had to be addressed without delay, and he became expert at describing the problem in such a way as to motivate everyone to take up arms to protect the pond.

Some of the frogs believed in the dangerous situations that Bull described, and some did not.  Those who didn’t believe in the danger came up with what they believed would solve the problem easily, but they were considered weak by the other frogs.  And Bull made sure these two groups stayed occupied in battling each other as to which side correctly understood the situation.

Frogs, of course, have desires. 

They have hopes and dreams, just like everyone else.  But these frogs only had desires that could be realized in water.  They didn’t know they could survive in air, and so naturally none of their ambitions pertained to things that could happen outside their watery home. 

But wait, you say!  These frogs are amphibians, and it’s still possible for them to leave the pond and work to satisfy those terrestrial desires!  Right?

Well, yes.  All amphibians have terrestrial possibilities, but those would never occur to these frogs because they have to do with breathing air, which nobody told them they could do.  Their range of choices is smaller than it would otherwise be, not because of the way things are, but because the rest of what is available to them is literally unthinkable.  Another way of saying that is, our frogs, the ones that are constrained to live in water, can’t consider options that don’t fit within that conception of who and what they are, which in this case is aquatic animals.

We human beings are like those frogs. 

Immersed in the ocean of belief

We have lived our entire lives immersed in an ocean of belief, which we like to call “our beliefs.”  We have never been outside that ocean, and it has never occurred to most of us that such a thing might be possible. 

While we have among us a number of people who play the role of Bull frog, they are actually just pretenders.  The real Bull is the belief system that each of us has bought into.  It has convinced us that we must stay within our beliefs and defend them with everything we have.  The real Bull has its own agenda, which is to stay in control.  

It is a rare human being that knows that he or she is immersed in the ocean of belief and that there are possibilities outside that ocean that most of us have never imagined.  And yet, we can never grow into the fullness of who we are until we make that leap, defying the common sense understanding of our own Bull and venturing into the unknown.