Eating an elephant

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

Way back when I was a kid, someone told me a joke. “How do you eat a whole elephant?” I was asked. I don’t remember now if I offered any ideas before being told the punchline or not, but it’s, in case you’ve never heard it before, “One bite at a time.”

On the surface, it’s a silly little play on words, kind of like the one where the tourist in New York City asks a guy on the street corner, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” And the guy says, “Practice, man, practice.”

But once you get past the basice “Well, duh…” premise of the joke, it’s actually a pretty significant metaphor. Oh, and before we get any further, this has nothing to do with the “elephants” mentioned in the column next to this one, although I probably could turn this into something political without too much trouble, but I’ll save that for another day…

See VIEWPOINT, page A5 VIEWPOINT

From page A4

Anyway, there’s an old Chinese proverb, often attributed to Confucius, but who knows with these things? It goes, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” And the “one bite at a time” thought sort og follows the same line of thinking.

You can’t eat a whole elephant in one bite. You can’t even do it in one sitting. You have to be prepared for it to take a while. And you don’t want to have elephant for every meal every day either.

You are going to need a cheeseburger or a salad or something every now and then.

And you can apply this to any major undertaking, task or project. Need to lose 50 pounds? Short of hacking off a limb, you can’t do it over night. Want to get a college degree but four years just seems like forever? It does take time, but it’s not impossible. Do you need to remodel your home? Landscape your yard? Rebuild a broken relationship? Give up a bad habit? You can do these things but it’s not going to be an instant gratification thing. It’s going to mean one “bite” at a time.

And you still have to do the other things your life requires and your body needs.

Maybe I’m being a little overly philosophical here talking about some deeper meaning found in a nine-yearold’s joke but I don’t think so. Figure out what your elephant is an take a bite out of it!