There’s a memorable scene in the movie Men In Black where Agent Jay, played by Will Smith, and Agent Kay, played by Tommy Lee Jones, are on the hunt for an alien cockroach cruising around New York City hell-bent on stealing a galaxy, igniting an intergalactic war and ending the world, all while wearing the skin of a dead farmer as a playsuit.
The recent MIB recruit Jay, eager to save the planet, sees the leather-faced invader fleeing from a jewellery store in a stolen truck and leaps into action. He takes out his weapon, the noisy cricket, and unexpectedly blasts a hole the size of a swimming pool into the jewellery storefront and then again into passing truck while catapulting himself through the windscreen of a car with the small guns recoil.
But the bad guy gets away, and agent Kay furiously grabs Jay, dragging him off the car as a group of New Yorkers begin to crowd around.
“We do not discharge our weapons in view of the public!” snarls Kay.
Jay, frustrated with the older agents lack of urgency to save the planet reminds him there is an alien battle cruiser ready to wipe everyone out at any moment.
Kay stares him down again, then sums up the situation.
“There’s always an Arquillian Battle Cruiser, or a Corillian Death Ray, or an intergalactic plague that is about to wipe out all life on this miserable little planet, and the only way these people can get on with their happy lives is that they DO NOT KNOW ABOUT IT!”
Kay is the voice of experience. Calm and rational. He has seen this all happen before and knows it will all happen again. He knew the alien wasn’t going to leave the planet any time soon so kept his cool under pressure. Jay is new to the game, full of reaction and unaware of the damage he is capable of causing with the power he has in his hands.
The World Isn’t Ending!
When we are under pressure, it can feel like the world is closing in, and it’s so easy to let our emotions get the better of us and make us lash out without recognising what is happening is just one moment in a long line of passing events called life that will not stop no matter how emotional we get.
In life there’s always going to be new issues to resolve, another accident to clean up, another disaster to avert, it could come in the form of an illness, a natural disaster, a pandemic even an election result.
We can choose to get swept up in it all, get frustrated or upset, like a noisy cricket, or we can use our time and energy effectively to do what we really need to do – take a step back, take in the information and then respond effectively to make a real difference.
When we react out of emotion, in the heat of the moment, or lash out, we waste energy and usually cause more harm than good.
As the movie goes on, Agent Jay begins to learn how to keep his cool under pressure. He doesn’t shoot the noisy cricket again, even when a potential opportunity arises.
Then in the final scenes of the movie, he is given a larger, more powerful weapon by Agent Kay which they use to shoot down a UFO, kill the 10-foot tall insect and save the planet. All in a days work.
This past year has been like something out of a movie. It’s been a non-stop conveyer belt of one bad report after the next. Sometimes it seems all that’s left is to bring out the aliens.
It’s easy to lose some hope in humanity or react emotionally without thinking in these times. But ‘shooting’ first and asking questions later, while easy to do, causes more damage when we could be using our time and energy to climb out of the situation.
The Donkey and the Well
One day a farmer was walking his old donkey in a field, and the donkey fell down into an abandoned well.
The farmer tried for hours retrieve the animal, while the donkey cried out not knowing what to do, but it was useless.
The farmer gave up, and realising his old donkey couldn’t be saved, he decided that he would fill in the well with soil to prevent any other animals falling into it in the future.
He and his neighbours began to shovel dirt into the well, and the donkey began to panic, it was being buried alive.
As the donkey calmed down, it began to shake the dirt from its back, and as each shovel load fell to the ground, he began to climb.
Soon enough the people were in awe as the old donkey climbed up and stepped up out of the well to freedom.
When we fall into an unfamiliar situation, become anxious or fearful of what the future holds, and the world shovels dirt on our backs, don’t panic. There is always going to be something to overcome. Use that pile of dirt to climb higher.
