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Beauty in the Beast
From the Heart | by Alan Cohen
How smart is nature? Is life communicating to you everything you need to know? Are
all living things connected by a network of grace? If you have any doubts, consider
this account received via the Internet.
From the chaos of the Tsunami disaster comes an incredible tale from Jim France of
the Pavilion Hotel Group in Bangkok:
At a resort on Phuket, one of the most popular attractions was the elephant ride.
As many as eight people would sit atop one elephant, who would escort the tourists
into the surrounding forest, down to the beach, to lunch at a fresh water lagoon,
and then back to the hotel. A team of nine elephants was kept chained to in-ground
posts, not because they were dangerous, but because it made tourist mothers feel
safer when their children fed the huge animals.
Twenty minutes before the first wave hit, the elephants became extremely agitated
and unruly. Four had just returned from a tour and their handlers had not yet chained
them. Suddenly the four helped their five peers tear free from their chains. Then
they all climbed a hill and began to bellow; many people followed them up the hill.
Then the waves began to crash. After the tsunami subsided, the elephants charged
down from the hill and began to pick up children with their trunks. Once the kids
were in place, the elephants ran them back up the hill to safety. When all the children
were taken care of, they started helping the adults.
The elephants rescued 42 people. Not until the task was done would they allow their
handlers to mount them. Then, with handlers atop, they began moving wreckage.
Filled with compassion
While we tend to regard nature as brutal and impersonal, it is filled with compassion.
God has imbued every one of us, from the ant to the whale -- humans included -- with
the capacity to know exactly what to do to help. If people or animals seem cold or
unkind, it is not because we were created that way. It is because we have learned
habits to the contrary from predecessors sullied by fear.
Several years ago at the Brookfield Zoo near Chicago, a 3-year-old boy climbed a
retaining wall and fell 17 feet onto the concrete floor of the gorilla pavilion.
The child hit his head and fell unconscious in the midst of a group of gorillas.
The boy's mother went hysterical, onlookers were horrified and several people ran
to summon zoo officials. Before anyone could get to the boy, a gorilla named Binti
Jua, with her own infant on her back, brushed away the other gorillas and took the
unconscious child in her arms. As the crowd watched astonished, she tenderly carried
the child to the door of the gorilla cage and handed him to an attendant. Later that
year, Time Magazine designated Binti Jua as the recipient of the Humanitarian of
the Year award.
Closer to our nature
While these incidents seem astonishing, they are far closer to our nature than the
cold-hearted manner to which many of us have become accustomed to living. Love is
natural and bitterness is learned. Yet, what was learned can be unlearned, and the
truth of our inherent kindness reveals itself when we most need it.
I caught an episode of a short-lived TV show, a sort of kindness-based candid camera.
The show set up actors in seeming distress and watched to see who would help them
and how. In one stunt, an anxious young man approached people in a supermarket and
asked them for help to choose food for a dinner he was preparing for his girlfriend.
He claimed that he was going to propose to her and he didn't know how to cook. While
some people shunned the fellow, three college guys took a liking to him and spent
a great deal of time walking him around the supermarket trying to help him. Even
more poignant, the stunt was done in Texas, the fellow needing help was black, and
the college guys were white. Very cool, I thought -- a powerful reversal of stereotypes
and negative expectations.
After all the stunts, the show picked the best helpers and rewarded them on camera
with $5,000 cash. None of the helpers was willing to accept the money. They all said
that they wanted to help just because it felt good, and that was enough reward. Thank
God some people have at least attained the evolutionary degree of a gorilla!
Kindness and service bring us rewards far deeper than mean-spiritedness and alienation,
for they offer expression to our nature as spiritual beings. Most people are good
at heart and want to get along. The media focuses so much attention on the murderers
and perverts that we come to believe they comprise a majority of the population.
It is not so. As one philosopher asked, "What are we here for if not to make
life easier for each other?"
Yes, life brings tsunamis. And yes, it also brings elephants to lift us to higher
ground.
Alan Cohen is the author of many popular inspirational books, including the best-selling
The Dragon Doesn't Live Here Anymore and Mr. Everit's Secret: What I Learned from
the World's Richest Man. Join Alan this August in Maui for his life-transforming
Mastery Training. For information on this program or to receive Alan's daily inspirational
quote and monthly newsletter, e-mail info@alancohen.com, phone 1 (800) 568-3079,
visit www.alancohen.com, or write P.O. Box 835, Haiku, HI 96708.
Copyright © 2005 Alan Cohen. All rights reserved. |
| April 2005 |
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