The curse of adults

The curse of adults is can’t.

Children do not view the world or live with such limitations. Henry Ford said, “Whether or not you think you can, you are right.” Adults put amazing amounts of limitations on their lives. As a pastor, people will come to me with a problem looking for a solution. More often than not, the advice I dispense is met with a litany of reasons why it will not work. They are trapped.

Every day I meet people who can’t get a job, can’t save money, can’t be physically active. Then I see people with two and three jobs, people who save even on smaller incomes and athletes running on plastic legs.

I talk to people and share ideas about how to do something different and I am told, “That would be great, but you can’t do that.”

Why not?

The experiment was conducted of placing a group of monkeys in a room with a bunch of bananas tied to the top of a tall pole. As the monkeys climbed to get to the bananas, a hose would spray water on them knocking them to the ground. Once all the monkeys had been knocked down repeatedly, they stopped striving for the bananas. One by one the monkeys were replaced with a new monkey. The new monkey would try to go for the bananas and the others would pull him down before he even had a chance to climb. Eventually, all of the monkeys had been replaced. None of these had ever been sprayed with the hose. Yet, anytime one of them would attempt to climb the pole, another would pull it down. Why? They didn’t even know why. It’s just what had always been taught to them.

I wonder if it would change the world if parents stopped saying “no” so much.

Of course, I probably shouldn’t be saying things like that.