Eating elephants
When I was growing up the walls of our house were sprinkled liberally with signs. Some of them were just paper. Others were plaques. Some were adorned with animals or scrolled writing. Others were plain words. All of them had cute or insightful “sayings” on them. “World’s Best Mom” they declared, or “This mess is a place”, “To rationalize is to tell yourself rational lies”, etc. They were the kinds of things that frequently end up on bumper stickers, and the all belonged to my mother. It was a vast collection that eventually burned in a house fire. The fact that my mother did not bother to replace them afterward makes me surmise that it was one of those collections that gain their own inertia as everyone kept giving her signs, rather than her own desire to wallpaper her house with “sayings.” I read all of those signs many times over during the years that they hung on the walls. I frequently recall various signs as an appropriate time in my life occurs.
Today I am remembering one sign in particular. It was a hand-lettered sign on plain paper that said “You can even eat an elephant, if you eat it one bite at a time.” We have 5000 books in our garage and a huge task ahead of us to get them all signed, sorted, and prepped for mailing. They weigh as much as an elephant. We have three weeks before the scheduled mailing day, which is more time that we usually allot. However we usually clear the decks of everything else. We have not been able to do that this time, because other people scheduled big things for us, unskippable things like Link’s cub scout Arrow of Light ceremony, an over night camp/hike, a television interview, a tree full of ripe pears, and the annual case lot sale which requires me to haul food home and then put it all away. It is rather like being told that since you’re eating anyway you should have this turkey and that mountain goat to go along with the elephant. So today is the day when we survey the whole project. We assign tasks and goals for each of the days in the next three weeks. Starting tomorrow, we’re no longer allowed to look at the whole elephant. Instead we have to focus only on the chunk allotted for that day. Once we start eating, we’ll only get depressed if we contemplate how much there is still to be done.
I’d be tempted to make my own copy of the sign and hang it on the wall as a reminder, except that I don’t want to start a collection such as the one my mother acquired. I wonder what task it was in my mother’s life that prompted her to hand write that sign and hang it on the wall. What task did she face that was so huge, she needed a daily reminder to just keep working at it? I suspect it was the task of raising children from babies to adults, a gargantuan task for anyone. I suppose I’ll have to ask her once we’re done with the elephant in the garage.