#Aesop February 9
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I overheard a conversation about our country not teaching morals in the grocery store. The person who was pontificating kept mentioning AESOP Fables.
The gentleman kept mentioning all the morals young people could learn if they were read some of AESOP stories. I drove home wondering just who was AESOP and how many stories are associated with him. I knew about “The Tortoise and The Hare”, “The Goose Who Laid the Golden Egg“, and “The Boy Who Cried Wolf“.
I assumed that AESOP was some Greek philosopher but I was wrong. He actually was a Greek slave (6th Century BC) and authored 725 of these fables. It is pretty safe to say it is the best known collection of morality tales.
The stories were originally told person to person. It is amazing to me that stories that are 2,500 years old stuck around. They had a stickiness to them that people remembered. Scholars suspect they didn’t get committed to being recorded or written down until 10th Century AD.
I went looking thru the collection and read the stories. As much as I hated to admit it but the the grocery store orator had a point. AESOP stories have the ability to make me think about “the moral of the story”.
Here are two they really resonated with me.
The Miller, His Son, and Their Ass
Moral of the story-“When you try to please everyone you wind up losing your ass”
Moral of the story-There are many who pretend to hate what they find hard to achieve
We all need to keep in mind that every story including the one about how we live our lives has a moral to it. The question is how sticky is our story? For our story to be sticky it needs many components including being credible. Don’t sell yourself short, there something memorable about your life story that can teach at least one other person a life lesson?
Sometimes it is good to revisit a familiar story whether it is AESOP’s or our own.
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