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If something is getting you down, find out what you can learn from an old donkey!

Written by: Linda Mattacks

Article Overview: A friend told me some time ago that his granddad used fables and stories when he was a young lad to get him to understand things that might otherwise have been difficult for a youngster to take on board. He said that what he’d learned from them had stayed with him ever since and still made utter sense. This short story is from him and it's about an old farmer and his equally old donkey…

If something is getting you down, find out what you can learn from an old donkey!

The farmer and his donkey would go out to plough the fields each day, whatever the season or the weather.

One day the donkey fell into a hole.

The farmer stood and pondered a while as to what he should do. The donkey couldn’t get out under its own steam, the farmer wasn’t strong enough to get him out on his own and the nearest village where he could get help was a good couple of hours walk away.

So the farmer finally and reluctantly decided that the donkey was near enough to the end of his life that he probably wouldn’t last much longer so he might as well just bury him in the hole. He set about the long hard task of shovelling the earth over his shoulder and into the hole.

Now the donkey was understandably not at all happy about this stuff landing on and around him and anyway had no intention of dying. So he started moving around, shaking the earth off and gradually tramping it down under him. The farmer, intent on digging and hurling in the earth, didn’t notice.

Some time later the donkey walked out of the hole…

So the moral of the tale:

If something’s getting you down, you’re not happy about it and have no intention of accepting it, learn from the old donkey:

Shake it off, put it behind you and get on with life!

All the best

Linda

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