Ascend
The Man, The Boy, and The Donkey
Welcome to another episode of the Ascend podcast with Curtis Vickery. Today I want to start with an ASAP fable titled "The Man, the Boy, and the Donkey." For those of you that don't know, I'll give an overview of it. I'm sure you could go read it, you could watch a video, all these things. But here's essentially the story. You've got a man and a son that decided to head to the local market and they take their donkey along with them and they are leading it as they walk. After a while they encounter a man and he shouts at them, "You fools, you should be riding the donkey." And they looked at each other and they're like, "Well, I guess you're right." So the boy climbed on top and was riding the donkey. A little while later, they come across another man who says, "Look at that lazy boy who allows his poor father to walk in the heat while he rides on a donkey. Shame on him." And they kind of looked at each other and they're like, "Well, maybe we should switch." So they switch so the boy gets off, the father gets on. And a while later, they encounter two women who see them traveling and the one woman says, "Shame on that dad. Look at that poor lad having to walk while his dad rides on a donkey." And the man and the boy kind of look at each other again and they feel confused and they realize, "Hey, maybe we both could ride on the donkey." And so they're both riding along on the donkey heading to the market and a while later they encounter another man. He says, "Aren't you ashamed of yourself for overloading that poor donkey?" And they were again confused and so they both got off and they wondered what to do and then they decided to actually tie the donkey's leg up, legs up to a pole and they carried out the rest of the way. And when they got to the market, people were laughing at them being like, "Why are you carrying your donkey? Your donkey is supposed to be carrying your things." And I actually really enjoy this story because I think stories can help us to understand a lot of things in life. And with this story in particular is that they got feedback from their surroundings and they tried to do things that made sense in changing based off of the suggestions that they got but they were doing it because of the criticism or the whole perspective of other people instead of not trying to make other people happy and worrying about what they felt like was right or wrong. And as you can tell in the story, it doesn't matter what way you do things. Someone will find something that they don't like or they think that is wrong. And then it's up to us to determine for ourselves, are we okay with that? Do we want to change? Are we changing because we have a desire to or are we changing because some random person says, "Hey, I think you're doing that wrong." And we get feedback all the time from the society we live in, whether it be your religious beliefs, the sports teams you like, the celebrities you follow, you don't follow, the politicians, all sorts of things you can get input on a lot of different topics. But in the end, it doesn't really matter what other people think. It matters what you think. And do you know why you're doing it? And if you know why you're doing it, there's a lot of ease and relief that can come into your life based off of you being comfortable for the decisions that you make. And that'd be something that I encourage you to do is that when or if you feel like you're getting caught up in this cycle of, "Well, I just can't make everybody happy." I hope that this may be a reminder or vice versa when that happens. You can remember this and be like, "Oh, maybe I'm caught up in worrying about what they think I should do versus what I think I should do." And there's a lot of joy and happiness and positivity that can come from doing the best that we can with the understanding that we can have, right? And how we attack life and how we seek for happiness in our own life by not finding it through the opinions of other people. So remember the man, the boy, and the donkey. And I hope you can find some comfort and some progress in your own life through that fable. This has been another episode you send podcasts. Keep climbing and join me again next time.