A Short Story About A Centipede and A Frog—and How To Better Balance Thinking and Being

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Excerpt: The following is an excerpt from Everyday Osho. In it, we meet a centipede and a frog and see the crippling effect overthinking can have in life.

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The Story About A Centipede and A Frog:

It was a beautiful sunny morning, and the centipede was happy and must have been singing in her heart. She was almost drunk with the morning air.

A frog sitting by the side was very puzzled. He asked, “Wait! You are doing a miracle. A hundred legs! How do you manage? Which leg comes first, which comes second, third—and so on, up to a hundred? Don’t you get puzzled? How do you manage? It looks impossible to me.”

The centipede said, “I have never thought about it. Let me brood.”

And standing there, she started trembling, and she fell down on the ground. She herself became so puzzled—a hundred legs! How was she going to manage? …

Afterword:

There’s a time and a place for thinking. And there’s a time and a place for being. All being and no thinking leads to rash decision making. And all thinking and no being leads to a sheltered, inexperienced life.

I spend a lot of time thinking—hence my daily blog that I’ve been publishing to consistently since January 1, 2020. And after reading this story, I think it is why I often stumble on being in my life.

Which isn’t to say that thinking is “bad”, nor is it to say that I’m “bad” at being.

Like most things in life, it’s a balancing act. One that I don’t think we’ll ever get perfectly correct, but one that we can and should be more conscious of and aim more deliberately for.

Like the centipede, there are times when we need to drop thinking altogether. Times when we’re experiencing life: walking, running, swimming, playing, hiking, meditating, listening, dancing, drawing, painting, etc.

But, like the frog, there are times when we should question what we find to be miraculous, too. Times when we’re reflecting on life so as to calibrate our internal GPS for the next, upcoming lived experiences. Times when we’re reading, writing, conversing, planning, researching, developing, building, brainstorming, imagining, visualizing, etc.

It’s when we get either of the two confused that we, like the centipede, start to stumble in life.

It’s when we start thinking about playing or meditating or dancing that it suddenly becomes awkward and unnatural. And it’s when we spend all of our time being and none of our time writing or planning or imagining that suddenly our mistakes repeat and our life trajectory worsens.

So, while it’s true that the frog could learn a thing or two from the centipede—so, too, is it true that the centipede might be able to learn a thing or two from the frog. And maybe… so can we.

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If you enjoyed the above short story about a centipede and a frog, then you should read Everyday Osho in full. It comes highly recommended:

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