A taste of honey!

Jeff Biggin
Feb 9, 2018
3 min read

A good friend of mine once told me a Hindu fable that it took many years for me truly to understand. I suppose I was in my late teens when this occurred ,

“A man is being chased through the jungle by a rampaging elephant, and in his desperation to escape his foot falls on less than solid ground and he finds himself falling into a pit. Well he thinks, at least I will be safe from the elephant. Unfortunately, he hears a roar and discovers that the pit has also claimed a tiger, a very hungry tiger that is restlessly circling the bottom of the pit. He has time to grab onto a piece of bamboo, which allows him to hang perilously above the tiger and below the path of the elephant. He breathes a short sigh of relief, however he notices that the bamboo is beginning to shake as it gradually loosens it’s hold on the soft earth. As the bamboo continues to loosen, it knocks loose a bee’s nest that results in two actions; the first is an angry swarm of released bees and the second is a trail of runny honey that begins to slide down the shaft of the bamboo. As the bamboo is all but wrenched from it’s hold the man turns his head and some of he honey drips onto his lips and he tastes the honey…………..and suddenly ‘gets it’.”

Well I didn’t ‘get it’ for a long time and even after many years I understood the point, but didn’t quite ‘get it’. Now I believe that I do, and am much more adept at being in the moment and use this ‘skill’ to good effect in my daily life and work. Indeed it became the inspiration for the work I have done in recent years on ‘time management’.

I had been on time management courses in the 1980s and 90s, where the subject was viewed as a cross between a magic bullet for improving personal effectiveness and a ‘how to manage your personal organiser’ guide. I persevered for almost 20 years with this approach and buying Filofaxes, Psion 3, 5, 7 and something called a Clie. In other people’s hands I’m sure that these are worthy and helpful instruments, for me they added virtually nothing to my ‘time management skills’ and they sit together in a box in the loft, maybe organizing time for one another.

It was only when I started asking myself deeper questions about how I perceived time and how it corresponded (or didn’t correspond) to how other people understood time that I started to ‘get it’.I discovered I have a synchronic approach to dealing with tasks and events, and am polychronic in the way I work.

Later on, as I developed as a counselor and trained in Gestalt techniques I found more significance in how I related to the past, the future and the present . And also how our effectiveness is very much dependent on our own relationship with these facets of time.

I raise many and more of these issues on my Time Management Programme and for those who want a little more to reflect on please download our paper on “The paradox of time: why what makes Jill effective makes John less so”. Oh, and you’ll also find a little taste of honey in there too.