This is Where the Monkey Dropped the Ball

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monkey
Tara Brach posted this story in her lovely blog: 
"One of my favorite stories took place a number of decades ago when the English had colonized India and they wanted to set up a golf course in Calcutta. Besides the fact that the English shouldn’t have been there in the first place, the golf course was not a particularly good idea. The biggest challenge was that the area was populated with monkeys.  
"The monkeys apparently were interested in golf too, and their way of joining the game was to go onto the course and take the balls that the golfers were hitting and toss them around in all directions. Of course the golfers didn’t like this at all, so they tried to control the monkeys. First they built high fences around the fairway; they went to a lot of trouble to do this. Now, monkeys climb...so, they weould climb over the fences and onto the course...that solution just didn’t work at all. The next thing they tried was to lure them away from the course. I don’t know how they tried to lure them—maybe waving bananas or something—but for every monkey that would go for the bananas, all their relatives would come into the golf course to join the fun. In desperation, they started trapping them and relocating them, but that didn’t work, either. The monkeys just had too many relatives who liked to play with golf balls! Finally, they established a novel rule for this particular golf course: the golfers in Calcutta had to play the ball wherever the monkey dropped it."
Life is basically a golf course full of monkeys. Building barriers takes a lot of energy. Getting upset at the way things worked out does, too. Sometimes that's energy you really need to hang on to, in order to dial with the situation at hand.

 More often than we think, we just have to say: "OK, This is where the monkey dropped the ball. I'll play it from here."

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