It all depends on perspective, as a situation can appear quite differently depending on your viewpoint and position in that situation. And sometimes a saying or analogy can be either viewed from a different angle, or mindset, which in turn gives it new meaning. There are many things over the years I have heard, and took them on board as their literal meaning, or intent as a phrase, not giving them closer thought until years later. Things like, once in a blue moon, when hell freezes over, under the weather, or things considered to be old wives’ tales or old beliefs. I pay more attention to them these days, as it seems often people have woven wisdom into analogies or phrases, to be passed down and kept in circulation, even if their original meaning isn’t always noticed. But this one is for an analogy, and one I have used myself in my book The Willing Observer, of the pot of water and the frog. The saying being that if you put a frog into boiling water, it will jump out being aware of the danger, but if you start the water cool, and slowly heat it up, it won’t notice and will boil to death. It’s simple and easy to grasp, and that is the only way I thought of it until today.

And it was a complete switch around for me of that analogy, where we are no longer the frog, and instead become the water, and the ones who dictate society became the frog. Who sat in the water of society for the longest time, creating their ideals and ways for the water to flow around them, calmly bathing and going about their froggy business. And it seems they are the ones who perhaps didn’t notice when the water starting getting agitated and starting to heat up, or perhaps they thought they could turn it back down again, who knows. But the idea that we are not the frog, and instead the people are the water heating up to boiling point, was suddenly a very clear one, and makes sense given how things are playing out at the moment.

But the idea that it is they who are unaware of what is really going on, does seem an interesting one, because although many don’t agree with how society is shaping up and the way it is being steered, I think it’s still almost a buckled comfort to think that someone is in control though, and even if it appears as chaos, they still want to believe that it’s organised chaos. Yet, as with water, we too are part of a collective, and moving freely and going with the flow is something we have in common with water. When that is halted or redirected it has an outcome. Think of a dam, and how it holds back a great volume of water, gathered and maintained, used for purpose, like us. But rivers and streams are able to flow and create their own path through nature, as we would too if we were able to, without having all the obstructions placed there by the authorities. Instead, any water that escapes the reservoir, seems to be siphoned into small pools and puddles, where it gets cut off and left to turn stagnant.

Yet water in large quantities with a path is incredibly powerful and can create a new landscape given the right circumstances and time. And that is how I think of society at the moment, that there is a huge body of water behind a dam that is starting to boil and there are small cracks appearing in the exterior of that dam. Little ones at first, as the water finds it and starts to flow, and then more, until it bursts and all that water that has been held back for the longest time, gets to move and go where it is meant to.

Be the water and not the frog.

(c) K Wicks