08/16/2026
Today's thoughts • 08-16-2026 • 1-Ay
“Kindly let me help you or you will drown,” said the monkey, putting the fish safely up a tree.
There is something almost painfully human in that sentence. The monkey is not cruel. The monkey is trying to help. The problem is that it understands the world only through the conditions that make sense to a monkey. Trees are safety. Air is life. Water looks dangerous. So it rescues the fish according to its own truth and, in doing so, destroys the very life it meant to protect.
We do this to each other constantly. We confuse familiarity with wisdom. We assume that because a certain way of living, healing, believing, working, loving, or surviving makes sense to us, it must also be the proper answer for someone else. Sometimes our deepest mistakes do not come from hatred at all. They come from certainty. They come from caring without listening, helping without understanding, and trying to move another person into the environment where we would feel safe.
Maybe real compassion begins somewhere quieter. Before rescuing, we observe. Before correcting, we listen. Before deciding that someone is drowning, we ask whether they are actually swimming. The fish does not need to become a better monkey, and the monkey does not need to learn to breathe underwater. Wisdom may be less about making everything fit the same definition of a good life and more about understanding the conditions in which different lives can actually flourish.
That feels like an important kind of inflection to me. A small turn in perspective that changes the whole horizon. Instead of asking, How do I make this person more like what I understand? we might ask, What is true for them that I cannot see from where I am standing? Sometimes the most loving thing we can do is resist the urge to drag the fish into our tree.
What strikes me first is that the monkey-and-fish story is not really a story about stupid people. That would make it too easy.
The monkey is caring. The monkey sees danger, feels urgency, acts, and probably expects gratitude afterward. That is why the parable hurts.
Some of the worst damage people do to one another comes wrapped in sincere concern. I know what you need. I know what normal looks like. I know where safety is. Come up here. And if the fish starts gasping, the monkey can even become confused or offended: But I saved you.
That makes the real philosophical enemy here something subtler than cruelty. It is unexamined certainty.
And that applies in every direction. Religion can do it. Medicine can do it. Families can do it. Politics can do it. Recovery communities can do it. Countercultures can do it. Even people obsessed with freedom can accidentally become little freedom-monkeys insisting everyone must be free in precisely the way they define freedom. 😂
The moment we stop asking what another creature actually requires and start assuming our own habitat is universal, the tree starts filling up with fish.
There’s another layer I really love: difference is not deficiency.
The fish isn’t an incompetent monkey.
That sentence alone could probably carry an entire Sunday.
We spend an extraordinary amount of human energy measuring people against environments they were never built for. Someone struggles in one school system, workplace, relationship structure, gender role, community, economic arrangement, lifestyle, or culture, and the conclusion becomes: something is wrong with the person.
Sometimes something is wrong with the water. Sometimes there simply isn’t enough water...
Keep your eyes on our horizon.
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