HOW TO CATCH A RACCOON

My home in America is Tennessee in the deep south, where they have many interesting local sayings.  One of my favorites is:

“If you are walking through an empty field and see a turtle on a fencepost, it probably didn’t get there by itself.”

Hmmm….

Tennessee is famous for Elvis Presley, bourbon whiskey, and rednecks.  And churches where they handle snakes.

I don’t believe in that religion, because I don’t think that god wants me to handle snakes.

A redneck is someone who lives in the woods, has quite a few firearms, and doesn’t like the government.  They usually have a couple of cars up on blocks out front that they are “working on.”

Rednecks, in spite of their unsavory reputation, are pretty clever.

Here is how a redneck catches a raccoon.  (What they do after they catch the raccoon, I’m not sure.)

Raccoons apparently like shiny, pretty things.  So the hunter catches a raccoon by drilling a small hole in a log, just big enough for the raccoon to fit its paw through, and in the hole the hunter puts a few shiny things.  Some bits of tin, or glass.

Shiny tin or glass is irresistible to a raccoon, and so the raccoon reaches into the hole to grab the shiny thing.

The hole however is so small, that when the raccoon tries to remove its paw from the hole, it can’t, because the clenched paw is bigger than the open paw that went into the hole in the first place.

You can see where this is going.  It doesn’t end well for the raccoon.

Redneck hunter shoots raccoon.  Successful hunt completed.

As far as anthropologists can tell, the primary actions of ancient man were hunting/gathering, having sex, and getting drunk.  This life probably wasn’t as good as it sounds, but it does sound pretty good compared to our goal-oriented modern culture.

In spite of being in the goal-achieving business as an executive coach, I can see the problem with goals.  Sometimes, like the raccoon, my clients have grasped on to something shiny and are unwilling to let go notwithstanding the dire consequences.

I once coached a client who was nearly 60 years old who had spent a long and illustrious career with one of the world’s top pharmaceutical companies.  However, this client had a nagging sense of unhappiness because of an unrealized dream since his university days, which was to become a pharmacist.  He had studied pharmacy and was licensed, but life took him into a different direction.

A turnaround came in a session one day when I asked him what his life might be like if he were to let go of that aspiration.  This is contrary to what one might expect from an executive coach.  Clients want coaches to help them achieve their goals, not help them give up.

Ultimately this client realized that there was a tremendous amount of suffering in holding on to a goal that he seemed unlikely to seriously pursue in the first place.

He let go of the goal.  Dropped the shiny object.  He didn’t let go of the possibility that he might one day move into pharmacy, but he let go of the concept that he had to do that to be happy.

One thing that is never impossible to achieve is…to achieve nothing.

If you get sick of winning or losing, letting go is the 3rd option.  Pursuing nothing liberates you from winning and losing.  What remains is the present.  The thing that is actually happening.  Which, since it is actually happening, is all that could ever happen.

This starts getting fuzzy when somebody wearing a white robe and talking in a melodious voice tells you that what is happening right now is the PERFECT thing to happen right now, and that it couldn’t be any other way because the universe is always right.

Try telling that to the raccoon.