Pushing a thin cow off a cliff

samfloy~9 December 2017 /East Africa/East Africa Culture

I was at an event on Wednesday when someone gave this analogy which I’d not heard before.

The story goes that a family is struggling to survive and all they have is a thin cow to feed them.

They therefore spend all their time and effort trying to keep the cow alive in the hope that it will feed them.

Then one day someone comes along and pushes the cow off the cliff.

At first the family are in shock and disbelief about how they will ever the survive.

But then they soon realise that when they look around there are many more options out there for them rather than trying to get everything from a single ailing cow.

As a result, they end up thriving.

The fable was told in the context of how change feels scary, but that ultimately people will adapt and things will be OK.

We were speaking about some of the decisions governments make, and how the public’s instinctive reaction is to resist the proposed change.

People seem to be adjusting just fine to Kenya strictly enforced ban of plastic bags, and we discussed how people were against the proposed banning of imported second hand clothes, despite long terms prospects of developing a clothes manufacturing industry.

Stuff like this gets you thinking what the thin cow is in your life right now…


In other news…

I’ve recently been transferring my old travel blog to the website. 

The trip I’ve done so far is the one to Latin America after university where I went to “find myself”, and looking back over it, rediscovered that five years ago today I was running an “End of the World (half) Marathon” in Belize, which you might find interesting to read about.

Beyond this, this joke has been doing the rounds in the flat this week:

“If I had a pound for every time my girlfriend said I was acting like Rainman… I’d have £1,437”


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