Gene's Blog

WHO OWNS THE BACKYARD?

Today, just a little piece from Steve Goodier. It takes a moment to think through what he is saying here, but the time is worth it. I’ll be back after it, for a moment.

Vicki Huffman, in PLUS LIVING (Harold Shaw Publishers, 1989),
tells about a man who loved to hunt and bought two pedigreed
setters that he trained to be fine bird dogs. He kept them in a
large, fenced pen in his backyard.

One morning he observed a little bulldog trotting down the alley
behind his home. It saw the two dogs and squeezed under the
fence. The man thought he should perhaps lock up the setters so
they wouldn’t hurt the little dog, but changed his mind. Maybe
they would “teach that bulldog a lesson,” he reasoned.

As he predicted, fur began to fly, and all of it was bulldog fur.
The feisty intruder soon had enough and squeezed back under the
fence to get away.

To the man’s surprise, the visitor returned again the next
morning. He crawled under the fence and once again took on the
tag-team of setters. And like the day before, he soon quit and
squeezed out of the pen.

The incident was repeated the following day, with the same
results.

The man left early the next morning on a business trip
and returned after several weeks. He asked his wife what finally
became of the bulldog.

“You won’t believe it,” she replied. “At the same time every day
that little dog came to the backyard and fought with our setters.
He never missed a day! It has come to the point now that when our
setters simply hear him snorting down the alley, they start
whining and run down into the basement. Then the little bulldog
struts around our backyard as if he owns it.”

That bulldog inspires me when it comes to managing problems. Not that
think I have to fight and impose my will on whatever is in my way. But
I appreciate that little dog’s perseverance. He persisted with his
problem until it disappeared.

Dale Carnegie made this observation: “Most of the important
things in the world have been accomplished by people who have
kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.” In the
end, it’s the persistent bulldog that will own the backyard.

— Steve Goodier

Perseverance is way under-rated. Without, I don’t think I’d be here today. I don’t consider that I own this backyard, but I certainly own a piece of it. Me. I’ve been working on a book that I mentioned a couple weeks ago, The Political Teachings of Jesus, by a man named Tod Lindberg, and an interesting little book it is indeed. Eminently practical, and quite surprising. I’m going to talk about that book soon, but right smack in the middle of it, I got sidetracked with life, or a bit of it, and when I came back to that book, I found jen had other plans, and if you want to know about perseverance, you just need try resisting her when she sets her mind to some thing, giggle. It isn’t that she makes me, or CAN, do anything, it is more in the relentlessness nature of the gentle prodding, through images and words, that eventually causes me to “get” her point. Things have order in this universe, the universe itself could not exist without that order, and to get to where we want to go, wherever that might be, we too, must follow an orderly path, or the next thing we know we find ourselves right back where we started. If you’ve ever been lost in a woods, you will immediately understand what I mean. :^). So, though, I still do sometimes try to ignore those inner pushes, I’ve found over time, it is usually best to at least listen to what she has to say. So, she sent me off to another book, that she thought I needed to have in mind, as I read Tod Lindberg’s book. Because there is an agenda, she says, and to put things together “right”, and that can be very different for each of us, we need to first understand what it is we are about, THEN build the plan to get from here to there. All this is, really, is a handful of ideas she wants me to have in mind as I read these other ideas, she says it will help me put the new in perspective with what I already know. I get that. It isn’t normally a good idea to start with calculus, basic arithmetic needs come first, giggle. I’ve skipped that basic part many times in my life and I’m not sure that has ever actually been to my advantage, I at some point HAD to go back to the source, to the beginning, to really understand what it was I was building, creating, SEEING. So that part is about over I think and I’m ready to come back into Mr. Lindberg’s work but from a very different perspective than I had been reading it. I’ll explain all that some day. Maybe. Until then though, I hope you have enjoyed the little bulldog story and that the wait for me to catch up with jen, will have been worthwhile. And there is WAY more in that subject up there than one might think, fair warning. much love, :^) gene