The Monkey Trap!

The Monkey Trap!

There is a popular method used in the East to capture monkeys. The hunters place a bunch of bananas in a bowl with a narrow opening at the top, and they fix the bowl somewhere in the jungle. A monkey passes by and notices the smell of banana coming from the bowl. He inserts his small arm through the narrow hole, grabs a banana and pulls his hand out. But the hole in the bowl is too narrow for his fist holding banana to pass through. The monkey tries pulling harder but he only hurts his wrist against the sharp edges of the bowl. In the meantime the hunters are approaching slowly and confidently. They see the monkey struggling frantically and they smile at the sight they’ve witnessed hundreds of times before. The monkey is holding on to the banana so hard that it’s impossible for him to realize that it is the one thing that is standing between him and his own freedom. All he needs to do is to let go of it and he’s free. The hunters are now few feet away. At this point most monkeys start screaming and pull their arms so hard that they faint from pain even before the hunters reach them. And there are few monkeys who surrender to the fact that the hunters are going to capture them when they see them coming. They just sit next to that bowl accepting that destiny. And in relaxing to that destiny, their hands let the banana slip and they are surprised to see that they are free when they stopped trying to be free.

There are even fewer monkeys who smell the banana, look at the bowl for a bit and start to think: why would someone place bananas in a bowl and leave them out in the open? When something is too good to be true, most often it is not. These few monkeys feel that there must be enough bananas up the trees. And even though it would take them a lot more effort to climb many trees where no banana would be found, it’s not worth giving up their freedom and reach for the ones inside the bowl.

Some of them end up finding enough banana to survive on. Fewer find a tree where no monkey has been before, and it’s got enough banana to feed them for life. Many others struggle to find enough banana to eat for the day. And some perish in search for their own bananas. But even those who didn’t find any banana up a tree agree: the view from that tree top was like nothing they’ve seen before.