Little Monkey
Preface: I was on a walk one day, and suddenly this imagery /metaphor sprang into my imagination and begged to be quickly jotted down. I expected to pause for a few moments to capture a fleeting image, to be expanded later. Instead, I “typed” away, on my phone, for over an hour, and all of this came out all at once. I fantasize about turning this into an illustrated work one day, but this may be all it’s meant to be, at least the time being.
Once upon a time there was a little monkey. She was tied up in a tree and never given any bananas. She never saw anyone foraging for bananas. She didn't even know there were such things as bananas. She saw this mushy white stuff that the other mamas were regurgitating for their young, but she didn't know where those things came from, what they tasted like, or anything about them. She just knew that the other monkeys looked happy and had this calm joyful look. So Little Monkey wanted the same thing.
Little Monkey was stuck in the tree all day, every day, and she felt so hungry. She didn't even know what that feeling was, that hunger feeling, she just felt an emptiness and longing she couldn’t place. Little Monkey was given some food sometimes, just enough to stay alive, but most of the time she felt hungry.
One day Little Monkey got free, and was so excited. But she still felt hungry.
Everywhere Little Monkey went, she felt hungry. Others would say to her, ”aren't you glad that you're not tied to the tree anymore?” Little Monkey was glad, but didn't understand why she still felt that emptiness (that hunger). So she said so.
They replied, “All you have to do is forage—there's food everywhere!” And when Little Monkey said, “But I don't know where to find it”, they said, “It's everywhere, just look around! The only reason you don't know that is that you used to be tied up. But now that you're free, you don't have to feel that way, because food is all around you. Just look at the abundance.”
Little Monkey felt a bit lost but started to think. Noticing only her furrowed brow, they added, “Try to stay in the present, not focus on your past when you were tied up. That's why you are still hungry—because you keep thinking about your past!”
Little Monkey thought to herself, “Okay, that sounds easy enough, I will try that! I will try anything!”. So Little Monkey started to focus on the present. And the more she focused, the more that hunger came into Little Monkey's awareness. Little Monkey started to feel sad. “I must be doing it wrong”, she thought.
Eventually Little Monkey decided that didn't feel very good, and wasn't going to do it anymore.
Little Monkey decided that instead she needed to learn what food looks like and how to find it. So she started asking a lot of questions.
Everywhere Little Monkey went, she would see other people with paws full of food. Bananas, even, but no one was sitting there with the banana in the peel, let alone near the tree it came from. They'd be eating the banana and say, “Look, this is what good food looks like”. So Little Monkey would look everywhere for something that looked like that. But Little Monkey couldn't find anything, anywhere, that looked like that. She was totally unaware that bananas came inside of a peel, or hung on trees.
Little Monkey kept asking questions, and finally someone said, “Food grows on plants, and it's colorful”. So Little Monkey went around and started trying to eat colorful plants. She was very disappointed to discover that most of this stuff didn't taste good at all, and very often Little Monkey just had to spit it out.
Sometimes the plants were toxic. Little Monkey would spit out the bitter-tasting stuff but could still end up getting a little poisoned. And feel sick for days. Unable to forage for days. When the success rate was so low, and poisoning so frequent, Little Monkey was often so disheartened that she felt little motivation to try to forage. Little Monkey was not getting enough food and, now, from the exertion of foraging, she was burning even more calories than when she was tied to the tree.
Little Monkey felt herself growing depleted. She didn't like this foraging life.
Sometimes others would say to Little Monkey, “Remember to really be with your present experience. You have so many resources available to you that you didn't have when you were stuck in that tree. When you dwell on the past and how you used to feel stuck in the tree, you can't focus on the present task of foraging.”
Little Monkey was confused. At times she would protest, “But those memories don't actually bother me that much. I didn't like being hungry, but that was my hunger in the past. The hunger I feel now is much more real—and in many ways more intense—to me now.”
She thought to herself, “I just want to eat, and I would like to be able to eat every day. But I so rarely eat on any days.” And she contemplated how the continued failure to find food left her without the energy to keep learning the task of foraging.
Everyone just kept telling her to keep foraging. She replied, “I do try, but the fact is, I come up empty, or I get little pockets of food here and there, but never enough to fill my belly. I just want to fill my belly and get a good night’s sleep.”
There was this one bush Little Monkey could count on having fruit, but it only had fruit at infrequent intervals, and it wasn’t enough to sustain her on its own. She thought about that bush often and thought, “I'm so glad i found this bush! It's the only reason that, some days of the week, I have any energy to forage at all. But having this bush doesn't solve the bigger problem of being hungry most of the time.”
Everywhere Little Monkey went, everyone was happily munching on another piece of fruit that looked delicious. Some of them would even describe what the plant looked like that it grew on. But no one could seem to give clear directions on how to find it.
They'd say, “Well, I got it from this tree over yonder, but there's no more fruit on that tree. You'll have to find your own”. Or sometimes they'd say, “Well, it's a little mysterious when the tree will fruit, but one day you'll learn how to tell when it's getting close to fruiting”.
Little Monkey thought to herself, “Okay, but how will I learn that?—especially when I've never even found the tree; I've only heard it described; seen others enjoying that fruit; never seen the tree with my own eyes. And no one even knows how to tell me where to find it.”
At the end of the day, most of what others offered up was really more a description of the destination (how she’d recognize it once she found it), rather than directions how to find it, rather than a map or instructions where a map might be found. All this advice didn't give Little Monkey any better clue how to forage successfully. And Little Monkey's hunger just meant that she kept feeling too tired to really put in the time learning better foraging skills.
So people would say to Little Monkey, “But you have to practice! We all had to practice a lot. That's normal.”
Little Monkey looked around, though, and didn't see any other monkeys who were so tired that they could barely climb a tree. She didn’t encounter others who so often wondered, as she did, is it even worth spending the last of my energy climbing this tree when it might have no fruit or might even poison me?
No one ever said, “Come with me, we'll go look for fruit together and I'll show you what I know.”
Instead people said, “You're a big monkey now, you can climb trees with branches much farther apart than you could climb when you were a tiny, helpless monkey. you can do it.”
Little Monkey thought, “Yes, this is true, I can't disagree. But when I was tiny, I wasn't meant to do all this anyway—someone was supposed to be feeding me. And somewhere along the way, as I was growing, there were supposed to be lessons in how to forage. I was supposed to learn that skill, and then I would have experienced my climbing skills improving. Then I'd have known from direct experience how my increasing body size was helpful for getting to which fruits. I never learned any of that. And I may have more raw strength, but most of the time, being so malnourished as I am, I really don't have much useful additional strength.”
Little Monkey really just needed to be able to watch other monkeys find food.
But instead the other monkeys just kept describing lots of wonderful things. Sometimes the descriptions evoked so much sadness and hunger in the little monkey, as she was reminded of the amazing things she had never tasted—especially when other monkeys said they ate this amazing fruit every day, and they never, ever felt hungry.
Little Monkey never gave up. She kept asking questions and kept trying to learn.
Sometimes Little Monkey just felt frustrated, just wanted to stop hearing everyone's wonderful stories of what it could be like one day, if only Little Monkey figured out all these things that she knew she needed to figure out.
But most of the time, Little Monkey kept listening, and tried harder and harder to learn. “What am I missing? What am I missing? I just don't know.”
Little Monkey realized, at some point, “I just need to eat enough food to be able to forage. That's what these other monkeys have—they have enough food. That's how they can forage.”
And then Little Monkey realized, “I just need to be able to watch other monkeys forage, and talk to them about how the foraging works”. But Little Monkey was not invited on foraging trips with the other monkeys.
Little Monkey occasionally saw some monkeys up a tree and would climb to eat fruit with them. There was much joy and celebration and laughter during those times. But then when it was over, the others would go their way. Little Monkey would look at the tree and say, “Okay, this is a tree that has fruit. I will return”. But there was no more fruit in that tree.
So then Little Monkey thought, “Well, let me see if I can find other trees that look like this one”. But Little Monkey could not. And when the energy gained from that feast had been depleted, and another source of food had not been found, Little Monkey was back where she started.
Other monkeys would say, “You should practice gratitude, and focus on being grateful for what you have. You're really so lucky you have enough resources to not totally starve and, hey—look! Every so often you find a feast! I bet if you gave more attention to how grateful and lucky you are for those experiences, you'd find inner strength to keep going and find more food.”
And Little Monkey thought, “But, oh my gosh, how can I not feel absolutely overwhelmed with gratitude and appreciation every time I get fruit from my one reliable bush? How can I not be filled with exuberance and gratitude at the feasts i stumble upon? If anything, I think I probably feel more intense gratitude than those who are feasting like this every day. I love these gratitude feelings and I feel them a lot. But for whatever reason, they don't seem to help me find more fruit trees, or give my muscles strength when I go so long without food. Am I doing it wrong?”
So Little Monkey kept trying, and trying, and trying. But all the other monkeys spent their entire lives going on foraging missions with older, wiser, more skilled monkeys. Many of them did it every day. But Little Monkey knew that there was no one to bring her along with them, and certainly not for the sheer total number of hours and days and years the other monkeys had spent accumulating their abilities and intuitions.
Little Monkey did her very best to piece together those missing abilities from the descriptions of other monkeys, but she still walked around feeling hungry most of the time.
And sometimes Little Monkey felt worse, thinking, “With everything I've learned, how come I am still hungry? At least before when I was hungry, I couldn't feel responsible for my own hunger.”