One Spring day an old man was walking along the banks of the Ganges River. The river waters were running fast and high with tree branches and roots floating along in the swift current. The old man saw that one bunch of roots had been hooked by a low-hanging branch of a tree next to the river and was bobbing up and down in the water> Then amidst the wet tangle of branch and leaf he noticed a scorpion entangled and trying to free itself. It seemed only a matter of minutes before the tree root would be pulled into the river again ensuring the scorpion’s doom. The old man reached out for the tree root and held it as best he could in place. He then reached out to rescue the scorpion. As soon as his hand was within reach, the scorpion lashed its tale and stung the old man. He drew back his hand, shook it and reached out again. Again the scorpion struck. Again and again he reached out and again and again the scorpion sank its stinger into the old man’s flesh. His hand was swollen and purple when a traveller wandered by and, watching this strange sight, shouted, "Hey, you old fool, can’t you see that that worthless creature will kill you before it lets itself be saved. Why not let it be?” The old man looked back at the traveller and said, "Ah, my friend, just because it is the nature of the scorpion to sting, why should I give up my own nature to save?”
Some Thoughts
I was reminded of this story while listening to a CBC Sunday Edition special on Viktor Frankl, author of Man's Search for Meaning. Frankl has always amazed me and my amazement has only grown over the years. I remember first reading Frankl's most famous book when i was 17 in CEGEP in Montreal. Free of the limits of high school reading, i took up residence in the library at Dawson College’s Selby campus and found remarkable treasures. I was captivated by readings in psychology, psychotherapy, and memory. High school had been more limited than I was able to know. It is only now, as I watch my son in grade 11 take courses in philosophy and anthropology that I can look back and see how parochial and impoverished my high school education was. But CEGEP was a new start and by happy accident I found myself in a dump of a school that had been fashioned from an old pill factory in an impoverished industrial section of Montreal (literally located under the elevated expressways leading into the downtown core). The Selby campus of Dawson College that I attended was dismal, smelled of car fumes and tobacco (from the cigarette manufacturers across the street). And while I had intended to go to the campus that specialized in sciences (beside the scenic Parc De la Vérendrye) I was accidentally enrolled in a school that felt like a parking garage. I was told I could transfer after a few weeks and that I should simply be patient. As I waited to be able to flee this strange exile, I learned that Selby was the campus that many foreign students were sent to improve their english. And I gradually began to see that this school looked and sounded like the world. After only a few weeks, wild horses couldn’t have dragged me away. I spent a lot of time in the library which was rather tattered and drab. Many of the books were as tattered as the carpet and furniture. But it was a quiet refuge away from the drug dealers who operated in the cigarette smoke-laden cafeteria and also a better choice than the student lounge that had two serviceable pool tables but which was poorly lit on account of the tar-blacked windows from the building’s factory days. The dim-lighting proved conducive to people looking either to nap or make out. The library, as i said, was my refuge.
High school had been unrelenting misery (4,500 fellow students, hundreds of teachers and many of them burned out if not alcoholics, drug dealers and gangs of bullies) but i consider myself lucky that in Quebec at that time i only had to bear it for four years. CEGEP felt like freedom. And with that freedom i binged on learning - reading Freud, Jung, Reich, Rank, Adler and, of course, Victor Frankl. I learned a little bit from each author, but while most of the ideas i learned of fascinated me and stretched my mind, it was only Frankl's work that touched my heart and truly bewildered me. I was deeply moved by his account of surviving the Holocaust but it would be many years before i would understand what he was describing. Nonetheless, his message about the power of the "last freedom" one has - even in the most dire circumstances - to choose one's disposition towards things - allowed me to reframe my entire life to that point. It was perhaps in that moment of encountering Frankl's work that i chose to take hold of my life and consciously take responsibility for educating myself further. Until that moment i had felt very much the victim of circumstances, helpless to do anything but endure the misery through which i had waded for many years (finding solace and escape in science fiction and fantasy literature). But Frankl's words and example inspired me to begin to imagine something more than mere endurance. Perhaps it was in that moment that i began truly to live.